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Big Batteries: Elon Musk And Powering South Australia – OpEd

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At the end of last month, Tesla boss Elon Musk held a party in South Australia’s mid-north. It seemed premature, but Musk was typically confident. Construction on what will be the world’s most powerful lithium ion battery was going well.

It had to. Musk has made a self-testing gamble with the South Australian government: complete the project within 100-days and duly be compensated for it, or build it for free. This is the sort of technology gambit EM delights in, even if it risks putting him $50 million out of pocket. Should all go well, the battery, once connected to the grid, will be operational by December 1, storing energy from French renewable company Neoen’s Hornsdale Wind Farm near Jamestown.

“To have that [construction] done in two months… you can’t remodel your kitchen in that period of time.” Confidently sparring with the audience, he claimed that the project “serves as a great example to the rest of the world of what can be done.”

The contract between Tesla and the South Australian government stipulates that, “The facility will provide services to maintain power system security, integrity and stability for the South Australian electricity network, prevent certain load shedding events, provide supply during critical peak periods and participate in ancillary services and wholesale electricity markets”. Truly, a tall order, though scale is something that has never troubled the billionaire.

The experiment is both dazzling and troubling for the energy-confused politicians who find themselves incapable of dealing with Australia’s energy woes. In a country where energy prices, be it electricity or gas, are astronomically high; where supply is questionable and more than occasionally interrupted during the high points of summer, the brains trust has proven skint.

The only state to attempt to challenge the continent’s troubles is South Australia. That plucky, often neglected entity within the Australian commonwealth has also paid a price, having faced blackouts in September last year. These have, in turn, become highly politicised events, seeing the state singled out by lovers of coal and natural resources for being fundamentalist in greening the grid.

Be it the former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, or his deposer, Malcolm Turnbull, South Australia is seen as an example to avoid, rather than emulate. Certainly, Musk admits to an element of doubt, even if small. “There is certainly some risk because this will be the largest battery installation in the world by a significant margin”.

Far from being deterred, efforts are being made from Adelaide to adjust and adapt. This is a crisis abundant with opportunity. Forget smug Victoria and brash New South Wales, the most populous, and supposedly more “advanced” of Australia’s family of states. South Australia, always a curious aberration of Australian development, will take the colours of innovation. In addition to a gas-fired plant comes Musk’s 100-megawatt battery. The latter’s strength lies in its stabilising potential, shoring up shortfalls when required.

The other troubling catch in this is not merely the echo of utopian, spellbinding confidence. Dealing with wealthy moguls and creatures of business on such a scale can make the populace jittery and anti-corruption watchdogs nervous. When parliamentarians choose to throw in their lot with cocksure businessmen, certainly Musk’s clout, rewards can sour.

The Murdoch press, never to pass up an opportunity to target anything environmentally friendly, has eyes on the project. The value of the contract, for instance, has not been disclosed. Business information of a confidential nature has been kept under wraps, though there is that nagging issue of public accountability.

The opposition politicians are similarly sceptical about the Musk dance with South Australia’s energy market, considering it Mephistophelean in nature. “With every passing day,” suggested Liberal deputy leader Vickie Chapman last month, “Labor’s secret deal sounds more like a marketing con than a genuine plan to deal with South Australia’s electricity problems.”[1]

Were the premier, Jay Weatherill, to not disclose “how much public money he is handing over to a foreign billionaire” the contract might risk, ventured Chapman, being investigated by the Independent Commissioner Against Corruption.

Musk is far from worried. He has a world to remake, grids to electrify, territories to save. While the Labor government in South Australia faces probing questions about deals with the energy devil, Musk is being pushed on another project: re-electrifying hurricane ravaged Puerto Rico. “Let’s talk,” suggested the territory’s governor Ricardo Rossello, keen to take the solar energy and storage route.[2] Musk seems more than willing.

Notes:
[1] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/marketing-con-fears-as-elon-musks-sa-battery-costs-remain-secret/news-story/64597062cc83ffd06cbe5fbc6bf14227

[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2017/10/06/puerto-rico-governor-ricardo-rossello-tweets-elon-musk-elon-puts-semi-hold-help-elontweets/


Debate In Vacuum On Joblessness In India – OpEd

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Does anybody know how many people are employed and how many remain unemployed in India today?

It is reported that of the total population in India in the working age group, around 7% constitute the organized class in the primary, secondary and tertiary sector. The remaining 93% constitute the unorganized class, which is also termed as informal sector.

The unorganized class is constituted largely by unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled people, some of whom may be self employed and others working as daily wage laborers or contract laborers in several areas like agriculture, real estate and construction etc.

It is now being propagated that jobless is increasing in India at alarming rate. Who has the real figures?

It is often reported in the media when some private companies in the software and other sectors retrench the employees for whatever reasons. But, rarely any news come about the number of people being employed newly in the private sector which is also happening. In the case of public sector, it is extremely rare that anyone would lose the job whatever his level of his efficiency or performance.

Data on jobs in organized sector

The ground reality is that there is no authentic figures available nor is it possible to collect with regard to the number of people getting jobs or losing jobs in the organized sector, particularly in the private sector.

Whatever information available about the unemployment is being collected and collated from the government run employment exchanges in the country. It is very well known that some of those registered in the employment exchanges for jobs may not really remain unemployed and may be usefully occupying themselves somewhere and looking out for better jobs. The employment exchanges do not have the practice of updating it’s unemployment data by conducting a primary survey among those registered with it, except requiring everyone to update their status periodically. Employment exchanges do not verify such data.

Data on jobs in unorganized sector

There is absolutely no data as to how many people are really employed or remain unemployed in the unorganized sector.

Even as the country is feverishly debating about the so called joblessness, there are complaints from several quarters including households that they find it difficult to get a plumber, electrician , carpenter or driver to carry out the required work.

The fact is that there is no joblessness for skilled and semi-skilled people in India today who find employment somewhere or remain self employed.

It is pointed out that there are hundreds of engineers and arts and science graduates who do not get jobs and their examples are cited to prove the level of joblessness in India. The fact is that the country do not really need so many engineers and arts and science graduates, who can only carry out desk work of general nature.

At the same time, we also find complaints from many companies and employers that they are not able to get suitable engineers or accountants and other persons for various jobs with sufficient merits and knowledge level to be given employment. The country has rapidly expanded the quantitative level of education at the cost of quality to some extent.

Crisis of skilllessness

The right way to describe the scenario in India today is not crisis of joblessness, but a crisis of skilllessness.

Realizing this scenario, Prime Minister Modi constituted a separate ministry in central government to promote skill development in the country. Several initiatives have been taken by the government to impart training in various skills for the people. While some progress has been made, a visible impact is yet to be seen on the ground.

What is required is to re orient hundreds of arts and science colleges in India and many engineering colleges and polytechnics as institutions for providing special skills in multi various fields, instead of general education that do not build job potential among the students.

The task is complex and challenging and there cannot be an over night solution.

The diagnosis is that there is huge level of lack of skill in India and several potential jobs are not happening due to such lack of skill among vast section of people.

Obviously, the debate on joblessness in India is taking place in vacuum.

Higher US Gas Prices Lead To Another Big Jump In Inflation, Core Rate Remains Stable – Analysis

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A 13.1 percent increase in gas prices led to a 0.5 percent jump in the CPI in September. The September increase brings the year-over-year increase in the overall CPI to 2.2 percent. However inflation in the core index, which excludes food and energy, rose just 0.1 percent, putting the year-over-year increase in the core at 1.7 percent. The annualized rate in the core, taking the average price level over the last three months (July, August, and September) compared with the prior three months (April, May, and June), is also 1.7 percent.

As has been the case for the last couple of years, even the modest rise in the core CPI is driven primarily by shelter costs. The core CPI, excluding shelter, rose only 0.6 percent over the last year.

The rate of inflation in shelter costs did slow slightly in September. After jumping 0.4 percent in August, the rent proper index rose 0.2 percent last month. It is up by 3.8 percent over the last year. The index for owners’ equivalent rent also rose 0.2 percent in September, after rising by 0.3 percent in August, bringing its year-over-year increase to 3.2 percent. Both indexes had shown some signs of slowing before the August jump. With vacancy rates edging somewhat higher over the last year (7.3 percent for the second quarter of 2017 compared with 6.7 percent in 2016), there is reason to believe that rate of increase in shelter costs may slow further.

A largely overlooked item that has been a major factor in inflation is auto insurance, the price of which rose 0.5 percent in September. Auto insurance prices have risen by 8.2 percent over the last year. This is actually an important component of the CPI, accounting for 2.6 percent of the overall index. This is less than the 6.7 percent weight for medical care services, but far more than the 1.8 percent weight for college tuition.

The rate of inflation in both of these components has slowed sharply in recent years. The index for medical care services rose by just 0.1 percent in September and is up by 1.7 percent over the last year. The index for college tuition and fees rose 0.6 percent in September, but this followed an anomalous drop of 0.3 percent in August.

Car prices continue to be an important factor keeping down the inflation rate. Used car prices fell 0.2 percent in September and are down 3.7 percent over the last year. New car prices fell 0.4 percent and are down 1.0 percent over the last year.

An anomaly on the low side was a 0.6 percent drop in prescription drug prices. This index is up by 1.4 percent over the last year. It is important to note that this index will not pick up most of the rise in drug prices since it measures changes in prices of existing drugs. Most of the increase in drug costs is due to new drugs being introduced at high prices.

An anomaly on the high side was a jump of 1.8 percent in the cost of intra-city mass transit. This is presumably a one-time jump since this index has risen by just 2.5 percent over the last year. There are few other areas showing substantial inflation. The price of alcoholic beverages rose by 0.4 percent in September, but has risen by just 1.3 percent over the last year. Tobacco prices also rose by 0.4 percent in September and are up 6.3 percent over the last year. This increase largely reflects higher taxes intended to discourage smoking.

It is difficult to find any evidence in this respect of accelerating inflation. The rise in gas prices that led to the jump in the overall CPI for September is likely in part driven by a temporary loss in refinery capacity due to Hurricane Harvey. It will likely be reversed and certainly not repeated. The producer price indices also show no evidence of price pressure at earlier stages of production. There is little reason to expect core inflation to reach the Fed’s 2.0 percent target in the foreseeable future.

Economic Conundrum And Job Creation: Dichotomy Hovers On ‘Modinomics’– Analysis

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Debaters wade in row over India;s economic growth and its impact on employment generation, after GDP growth slashed to 5.7 percent in the first quarter of 2017-18. Prime Minister Narendra Modi committed one crore ( 10 million ) jobs a year before the election in 2014. According to Labour Bureau statistics, job creation for 2015 and 2016 ( April – December) were at much lower level than committed – 15.5 million and 23.1 million respectively.

Indian analysts held NDA responsible for mishandling the economy and cursed the government for faulty manufacturing policy. Manufacturing sector – the core sector for the GDP growth – witnessed a drastic fall in the growth to 1.2 percent in the first quarter of GDP growth in 2017-18 against 10.7 percent growth in the corresponding period in the preceding year. Manufacturing or Make in India was the focus area for employment generation in Modinomics

Contrary to these, multinational institutions like IMF and Morgan Stanley were upbeat on the India growth trajectory from the perspectives of long term growth and recovery. They overlooked the temporary hick-up in their assessment.

The IMF, in its recent report on World Economic Outlook, forecast a strong recovery in the Indian economy in 2018-19 with 7.4 percent growth, after a laggard growth of 6.7 percent in the current year 2017-18 due to lingering of demonetization impact. Morgan Stanley pitched for over-lasting growth, ranking up India to be 3rd biggest economy in the world in 2026-27. At present, India is the 6th biggest economy in the world in terms of nominal GDP. Both IMF and Morgan Stanley presumed continuance of strong economic parameters, considering that the jerk in the first quarter of growth was transient.

The BSE Sensex was mute to the jerk, despite the fact that Sensex is the first to be vulnerable to any upheaval in the growth, short or long term. Sensex continued to surge and was expected to exceed 1,00,000 by 2026-27, according Morgan Stanley report.

If statistics are any indicator to map out the impact of Modinomocs on job creations, they decipher that several schemes of Make in India failed to unleash desired results for job creations. Start-up, digitization, Smart-city programme lagged behind in creating jobs.

Various reasons focused for failure of Make in India. One of them was domestic investors’ laggardness to invest in Modi regime. What led the domestic investors to shy away, when the foreign investors were upbeat to invest in the Modi regime? Foreign direct investment doubled to US $47 billion in 2016, from US $ 22 billion in 2013. BSE Sensex, which is driven by FIIs (Foreign Institutional Investors), surged despite the GDP conundrum.

The moot point in the lackluster domestic investment was the lag in reforms in regulatory policy framework. Reforms in Land acquisition regulations and labour laws were put in in the backburner due to minority strength of NDA in Rajya Sabha. State level amendments were pushed for Land Acquisition reforms in some states (Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Telengana). But they are yet to be put into operations.

Even though foreign investment surged, but it failed to create more job opportunities too. The crux of the situation was that more than 85 percent of foreign direct investment was in the greenfield areas. Generally, a green field project in manufacturing requires 2-3 three years gestation period to start the operation. Given these, yields of job creations from theses FDI projects will be visible only after 2018. Therefore, it is time period which will decide the impact of foreign investment on employment opportunities.

India’s  economy is at the inflection point. It will witness a shift in its demand pattern. According to Morgan Stanley’s report, middle class will shift to upper middle class by 2026-27. Young India, digitization, wheel revolution ( automobile) and spurring home purchasing will be the main driving forces for new demand. India will be the youngest country in the world by 2020. With the median age 29, India will have 400 young people.

Digitization will be the boost to growth, according to Morgan Stanley. Digital India and Smart cities are the long term projects to generate employment opportunities. They are at the nascent stages and take time to be in full operation. Under the Smart-city initiatives, so far 60 out 100 cities could determine the projects costs. Of these, only 16 projects are in the implementations and the remaining 45 are at various stages of tendering.

Considering vast changes in the technology and industrial structure since 1991, need for changes in the Industrial policy was felt imperative. A discussion paper was circulated for seeking different advises and opinions for a new shape to Industrial Policy with a focus on Reform, Perform and Transform. The paper asserted for global linkages, gave thrusts on new industries like automobiles, electronics, renewable energies, banking, software and tourism and warrant for land reforms. But, the discussion paper remains a document so far.

The year 2018 will be the turning point for Indian manufacturing sector under Make in India initiative. With BJP and its allies making a big inroad in Rajya Sabha after one-third of the members retire, two major pending reforms, land acquisition bill and labour reform , will find easy access for Parliamentary approval.

The new political landscape in 2018, which will give more free hand to NDA accelerate reforms, will endorse IMF forecast for the recovery of the economy, when the GDP growth was expected to reach 7.4 percent in 2018-19.

Therefore, given the strong economic parameters and a strong platform for Young India, it will be pessimism to presume that a short hiccup in first quarter growth will play a strong headwind to growth trajectory of Indian economy and will impact job opportunities from the long term perspectives.

Views expressed are personal

Syria’s Humanitarian Crisis – OpEd

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Syria’s civil war has created a humanitarian crisis of horrendous proportions. With most media comment focused on the struggle against Islamic State and the consequent gains and losses on the battlefield, far too little attention has been paid to the immeasurable suffering the conflict has inflicted on huge numbers of the Syrian people.

Civilian deaths as a result of the fighting and from poison gas attacks in the course of combat have been estimated at some 300,000. That, indeed, is a massive toll of innocent life. But the truly staggering statistics relate to the living.

The country’s pre-war population was some 21 million. UN figures show that at the last count, on 28 September 2017, well over half the population – something approaching 12 million Syrians – had been displaced from their homes. Some 6.3 million are homeless within Syria, but no less than 5.2 million have fled the country and are now refugees – over half of them, it has been estimated, under the age of 18. This figure includes 2 million Syrians registered by UNHCR in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, over 3 million registered by Turkey, and more than 30,000 Syrian refugees registered in North Africa.

All this translates into a humanitarian tragedy that ought to be attracting global attention. As far as the media is concerned, it seems to have been buried under competing news stories of more immediate public interest. In the political arena, however, something more sinister seems to be happening. As Bashar al-Assad’s forces, empowered by Russian and Iranian military support, wrest increasing amounts of territory from Islamic State, and as the regime reasserts authority over it, the prospect of the president remaining in power, at least for a transitional period, seems to be gaining acceptance. Reports back in March indicated that US diplomatic policy is “no longer focused on making the war-torn country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, leave power.”

This shift in sentiment could only be enhanced by signs of a return to normality within Syria, such as a flow of returning displaced civilians. The International Organization for Migration said in August that some 600,000 displaced Syrians had returned to their homes in 2017. When Andrej Mahecic of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) spoke of the trend, he felt bound to add that the number of those coming back was a “fraction” of the estimated 12 million displaced Syrians.

Turkey, host to by far the largest number of Syrian refugees, offered them a major concession in 2017, perhaps in the hope of trimming the numbers. It gave formal permission to all Syrian refugees to return temporarily to their country to celebrate the Eid al-Fitr holiday, which began on June 25. Those taking advantage of the offer had to register on a dedicated website and were required to return to Turkey by a given date, different depending on which crossing they chose to use. Otherwise they would be treated as new arrivals and subject to the regular immigration process.

Missing the due date would indeed have constituted an obstacle of major proportions. Turkey has sealed off its Syrian border with fences, minefields, ditches and a massive security wall aimed at stemming the refugee flow into the country. There are reports of Turkish border guards shooting at Syrian refugees trying to cross the border without going through the formal registration process. Media reports indicated that most Syrians taking advantage of the Eid al-Fitr concession intended to return to Turkey, but that some 9,000 opted to stay.

The concession was renewed a few weeks later to mark the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice, Eid al-Adha. The main border crossing between Turkey and Syria opened on August 15, and five days later around 12,000 refugees had passed into Syria. They were allowed back into Turkey as from September 5, and the crossing closes on October 15.

Meanwhile the snail-pace UN-backed peace negotiations crawl on. Seven previous rounds have failed to persuade the adversaries to hold face-to-face talks, let alone make progress. Nonetheless the persistent UN Special Envoy, Staffan de Mistura, said in mid-August 2017 that the United Nations hopes for a “serious negotiation” between the government and a still-to-be-formed unified Syrian opposition in October or November. He expected a unified position to emerge after the three opposition delegations took “stock of the realities on the ground”, at a meeting in October.

Progress towards meaningful discussions on ending Syria’s civil war and planning a viable future for the country has been frustrated by the failure of the opposition parties to agree a common approach. The main opposition is the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), which is totally opposed to Bashar al-Assad retaining power of any sort in a reconstituted Syria. The two other dissident groupings, the “Moscow” and “Cairo” platforms, are much less opposed to Assad being associated in some way in a post-war arrangement, perhaps for a “transition period”.

Unsurprisingly, the Syrian government team has refused to engage with the HNC, and would be likely to do so with a united opposition only if the HNC’s hard line had somehow been softened.

Ever optimistic, de Mistura has said, “Regarding the (Syrian) government, we are counting very much on Russia, on Iran, on anyone who has got major influence, and on the government of Syria to be ready finally to initiate, when they are invited to Geneva, a genuine, direct negotiation with whatever (opposition) platform comes out.”

Clearly a long, difficult diplomatic process stretches out ahead. Meanwhile Syria remains a battlefield, civilians are still being killed, thousands are fleeing their country, and 12 million displaced Syrians struggle to live anything approaching a decent life.

The Vatican recently published a 20-point plan on refugees which encourages countries to introduce community sponsorship legislation such as Canada’s system, which allows concerned citizens to organize and raise money to bring refugees to their country and help them towards citizenship. Now other governments, such as Ireland and New Zealand, are exploring the possibilities of allowing citizens to take action through such schemes. Last year the UK actually introduced legislation to make community sponsorship possible. Such people-powered initiatives enable ordinary citizens to demonstrate the humanity that has been conspicuous by its absence in the responses of world leaders.

Political Islam In Post-Conflict Algeria – Analysis

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By Vish Sakthivel*

Despite the considerable attention in recent years to Islamist movements in the Middle East and North Africa, the situation in Algeria often goes overlooked. This oversight is perhaps due to a persistent focus on Algeria’s high politics as well as the chiefly terror/counter-terror lens through which Algeria has been understood since the end of its civil war (1991-2002). Moreover, to many it appeared the 2010-11 “Arab Spring” uprisings did not profoundly alter the country’s political landscape. Because of these analytical biases, Algeria’s Islamism, the country’s parties, civil society, and its contentious politics at-large have not been adequately explored.

Algeria’s Islamist politics are often presumed dead. Indeed, most discussions on the subject begin and end with the “first” Arab uprisings that took place twenty years ago. These reference the rise and fall of Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) party between 1988 and 1992, Algeria’s descent into a harrowing civil war (sometimes called the “Black Decade”) after they were stripped of power, lessons to be drawn from the FIS’s demise, and the lingering effects of the war on North African security and terror. Algeria’s armed groups and terrorist organizations exist mostly on society’s margins. And while they are central to understanding the country’s geopolitics, foreign policy, and the ruling political-military machine,1 they are arguably less important to understanding current dynamics and trends in the country’s domestic religious and social scene.

This essay broadly examines how Islamist currents in Algeria have evolved and contended with deep changes in the domestic sociopolitical milieu since the Black Decade.2 It focuses chiefly on the case of the Islamist party Movement for a Society of Peace (MSP), Algeria’s self-avowed branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and the largest formal Islamist organization to emerge from this war. It also devotes some attention to the shifts in and spread of Salafist strains, Sufi brotherhoods and smaller Islamist parties. Some of these actors are represented in the formal political sphere and have expressly political/electoral goals, while others exist outside this fray with avowedly non-political impetuses but still actively shape the electorate. These dynamics are in many ways reflective of larger patterns in North Africa and the Middle East. But Algeria’s complex political-religious landscape also compels us in its own right, to reconsider how Islamism can be defined, as well as conventional wisdom about Islamist behavior.

Partisan Islam

Since the birth of modern Algeria in 1962, Islam and Muslim identity have been a foundational pillar of the sovereign Algerian state. The revolutionary generation saw a centralized Muslim-Algerian identity as a bulwark against attempts by the French during the colonial occupation to erode the country’s social fabric and sow division among ethnic groups, regions and religious sects. Islam thus was discursively linked with Algerian indigeneity and identity, and religion became a central rallying point of the revolution itself, whose many voices and movements were eventually consolidated under the National Liberation Front (FLN). The religious and existential character of the country’s liberation struggle was—and still is—reflected in the fact that the freedom fighters are called moudjahideen, and those who died in the struggle are called chouhada, or martyrs.

In the run-up to independence in 1962 and during the nation-building that followed, various religious tendencies were integrated and consolidated by the state—the FLN party-army machine. To this end, the state appropriated the famed refrain of 20th century Islamic reformist Abdelhamid Ben Badis3: “Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, and Algeria is my country” along with the full extent of its attendant religious-nationalist symbolism.4 In practice, the state attempted to control religious doctrine by creating a Religious Affairs Ministry that monitored and administered Islamic activities throughout the country. Religious scholars and preachers became state employees, and Islamic practices and ideas outside the government-approved framework were dissuaded and suppressed. (Who and what exactly constitutes the “state” remains obscured to most. It is usually seen as a trifecta of the FLN party, the military, and the security services, known as Le Pouvoir, or “The Power.” These elements have jockeyed with one another for clout over the decades.)

However, as far back as the early 1960s the government faced opposition to its efforts to centralize religion under the state.5 Within the FLN itself, religious opponents to second Algerian president Houari Boumediène’s socialist policies called instead for an “Islamic socialism.”6 Outside of the party, organized Islamic scholars7 fervently criticized the various presidents’ secular, leftist policies, and specifically attacked the alleged moral laxity of Boumediène’s 1971 “socialist revolution.”8 Influential religious associations such as al-Qiyam9 also pressured the regime to draw upon both Shari’a and nationalism in crafting policy—alleging that elements of the socialist proposals contravened Islamic scriptures outright.

In the 1970s and 1980s, religious, political, and economic grievances continued to build throughout Algeria, and in 1988, these pressures erupted in violent protests that shook the heavily populated north. In response to the unrest, the Algerian state abolished the single-party system in 1989 and replaced it with a multi-party system—albeit one still dominated by the FLN—in a new constitution. This political opening led to an explosion of new parties each along the lines of almost every ethnic, religious, intellectual, and cultural current in the country.10

Though the Islamic activists had disagreed with Boumediène’s policies, he nevertheless promoted Islamic activity and Arabization to cement the nationalist identity the state had been trying to forge since before independence.11 This empowered religious activism, which had intensified throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as Islamist movements and tendencies had converged and splintered along ideological and strategic lines. By the 1989 opening, three main (though not comprehensive) partisan movements had taken shape: The Movement for a Society of Peace (MSP, known as Hamas until 1996, although sometimes still referred to as such by party outsiders) under Mahfoud Nahnah, the Al-Nahda tendency led by Abdallah Djaballah, and the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) led by Ali Belhadj and Abassi Madani.12

The FIS formed from various religious movements, platforms, and intellectual strains in direct response to the mass uprisings and the new 1989 constitution. Through its novel and fiery rhetoric, the FIS mobilized large segments of the populace and was the first contemporary organization to more substantially erode the state’s control of Islamic discourse and institutions. Compared to the FIS, Nahnah’s MSP and Djaballah’s Al-Nahda were more restrained in their deployment of antisystem frames, mostly refraining from calling for the subversion of the military-backed system. As a result, these movements mobilized only modest numbers of people at this time, but unlike the FIS, they also secured for themselves a safer relationship with the regime.

Of these Islamist parties, the FIS initially became the most important player, first in the 1990 local and regional elections where it won the mayoral offices and majorities in most local governments in the populous north, and then again in the first round of parliamentary elections in 1991. Threatened by the FIS’s electoral successes, the military canceled the results as well as the second round of elections in 1992, dismissed the sitting president, and dissolved the FIS. The military cadres in favor justified its position as one that was “saving democracy.” This move unleashed radical elements within the FIS and pushed still other FIS activists into hitherto marginal radical organizations which then violently targeted the state, with later iterations targeting civilians.

The military violently cracked down on the FIS as well as these armed groups, sometimes indiscriminately, and armed Islamist groups retaliated, equally indiscriminately. From 1991-2002, the unremitting circle of violence between these insurgent factions and the army’s13 eradicateur (eradicator) program14 claimed hundred of thousands of civilian lives in what came to be known as the “Black Decade.” Ultimately, the military succeeded in crushing the FIS, and the main surviving Islamist parties—the MSP and Al-Nahda—found themselves in a wholly transformed environment in at least two respects.

First, the experience and memory of the conflict made the public at-large deeply averse to Islamism. The public, often not knowing qui tue qui, or “who was killing whom” during the conflict—the state or the insurgents—was further confused by the seeming multiplication of armed groups; it thus slowly came to conflate the FIS Islamist party with the insurgency. This trauma and confusion rendered a majority of citizens wary of radical politics; revolution, religious or otherwise, came to be widely seen as a false promise in the war’s aftermath. Though the conflict initially helped chip away at some of the state’s claims to religious authority, as the war wound down much of the Algerian populace came to prefer “state Islam” to challenger Islamist currents. Nowadays, it is rare (though not impossible) to hear someone say they oppose state control and provision of mosques, or that the 1992 cancellation of the election was unnecessary. Also, it is not always common to hear the period referred to as the Black Decade (or décennie noire in French). Instead, in everyday parlance the civil war is more commonly described as “waqt al-irhab”—the time of terrorism.

This is partly because the state appropriated and iconized individuals’ experiences of violence to support its framing and official history of the war, which cast Islamist insurgents as the sole aggressors. This discourse was cyclically-reproduced as civilians were enlisted in this process, and led much of the Algerian public to blame the insurgents, and by extension the FIS and its ideology,15 rather than the army’s use of violence against civilians, or the state’s cancellation of what were in fact free and fair elections.

Second, in addition to having to contend with a polity averse to Islamism, the MSP and Al-Nahda parties after 2002 also had to deal with a public that was growing weary of party politics itself. Parties were increasingly delegitimized for several reasons. First, following the 1989 political opening and through the 1990s, the sheer number of parties exceeded the number of social cleavages and political leanings,16 thereby saturating the partisan arena and confusing voters. Second, for much of the wider public, the idea of parties as vehicles for political representation was still new; Algerians were both inexperienced with multi-party politics and their political preferences were still evolving.

The public’s faith in parties was further eroded by the fact that the electoral process and parties themselves became tightly controlled by the state, especially during the Black Decade. The regime fragmented and coopted the opposition through political deals, trivial policy concessions, and financial rewards via its embedded patronage networks and rentier (chiefly oil) economy—while retaining a veneer of multi-party dynamism. Because of these factors, Algeria has emerged as a prototypical “liberalized autocracy,” where nominal competitiveness in political life has provided cover for entrenched authoritarianism.

This has become increasingly evident to the public, where the notion of ‘hizb’ (party) or ‘tahazub’ (literally partisanship, often used to reference the process of ‘party-fication’ of a movement) have become shorthand for political opportunism, or relinquishment of organizational and ideological integrity.

In the meantime, the state came to be seen as an all-powerful “man behind the curtain.”17 To be sure, the feared Department of Intelligence and Security, or DRS, (re-constituted in 2015 as the Department of Surveillance and Security, DSS18), was for decades the linchpin of state power, but gained even greater clout after the Black Decade. The powerful DRS infiltrated the armed Islamist groups, embedded itself throughout civilian life and, later, seized control of the narrative on the conflict. These methods renewed another sentiment: of an omnipotent regime backed by an invincible army and omnipresent intelligence apparatus.19 (The state also won back some political legitimacy as the broker of reconciliation and stability after the conflict.20) Since the end of the war, the regime has established itself as the sole protector of the citizenry, while harnessing fears over the threat of terror and the unknown. Political processes, including elections and the founding of new parties, are widely thought to be pre-determined and orchestrated by the DRS—as a result, the polity has generally retreated from its stakes in political and electoral outcomes. Whether real or perceived, this predominating belief in the regime’s pervasive power has nevertheless altered the electorate the Islamist parties have pursued.

For Islamists, the political environment after the Black Decade posed new challenges: What path, after all, could surviving Islamist parties like the MSP and Al-Nahda forge in a context where both political Islam and the partisan arena were increasingly distrusted?

A New Path Forward

The trauma and historical memory of civil war—compounded by the parties’ own inability to effectively dodge state efforts to coopt and divide them—produced shifts in the population’s political preferences unfavorable to Islamists. Meanwhile, an increasingly constrictive legal environment (explained more fully in the next section) dampened the parties’ core initiatives and political identity. Taken together, these factors left Islamist parties swimming upstream. Nevertheless, Algeria’s Islamist parties have come up with ways—suited specifically to the challenges of their context—to mobilize people, advance their agenda, and even contest the state.

In 1989, Abdallah Djaballah21 founded the Al-Nahda movement. Like the MSP, Al-Nahda was influenced in part by the Muslim Brotherhood. The party opted to participate in the 1997 parliamentary elections, and through this it helped to legitimize, along with the MSP, one of the first political processes since the Black Decade. Djaballah, however, was a more vociferous opponent of the regime and less of a loyalist than his counterparts in the MSP. As such, Al-Nahda under his guidance drew stricter terms and did not accept ministerial positions, in a stated bid to maintain credibility and retain nuisance power. However, the more cooperative MSP’s 1997 electoral performance—second place with 14 percent of the vote and winning 69 seats, more even than the FLN, which placed third with 62 seats—inspired debates within Al-Nahda. Various early party cadres deemed Djaballah’s approach too rigid, and he was ejected from Al-Nahda, after which he immediately formed a new party Islah.22 Years later, this scenario repeated itself, with Islah expelling Djaballah as its cadres again sought greater proximity to state interests and grew tired of Djaballah’s commitment to non-cooperation—which the state actively incentivized. In 2011, Djaballah founded his latest party, Adala.23

For the three smaller Islamist parties of Djaballah’s “eastern tendency”24, pursuit of ministries led to consecutive internal coups. For the MSP, in contrast, it would be the search for the ever-elusive “original vision” of late founder Nahnah—particularly as it related to the extent of cooperation with the regime—that led to breakaways and a proliferation of micro-parties. Of course, the state played a large role in incentivizing splinters here and in the wider Islamist landscape. Its rewarding of the MSP’s more obsequious stance, by boosting its numbers at the polls, however led its ranks to agonize over what they saw as their increasingly tokenized participation and its implications for their autonomy and claims to moral rectitude.25

The MSP’s relative success versus the Djaballah camp can be attributed in part to state meddling. But the Nahnah camp (for a time at least) also achieved a more optimal balance between opposition credibility and selective loyalism to the state, perhaps having better considered public opinion and the wary polity in two ways. First, MSP figures hedged against antipathy to political Islam by selectively downplaying their Islamist orientation and platforms, and positioning themselves as nationalists and “moderate” alternatives to the more militant Islamists of the Black Decade. Second, it hedged against disdain for parties by harnessing the associational sphere—informal networks, such as student unions—in order to feign distance from the trappings of partisan politics.

The MSP (then Hamas) was legalized in 1990 after the political opening of 1989. The movement aimed to compete directly with the FIS, and in this, it had the regime’s implicit support. The MSP founder Mahfoud Nahnah, supported by co-founders Mohamed Bouslimani and Mustapha Belmehdi,26 attempted a more gradual, loyalist, reform-oriented, bottom-up approach. Nahnah criticized what he considered the FIS’s coercion of disenfranchised groups, and the MSP recruited among a more educated demographic.

As the FIS won handily, the MSP’s mobilization efforts peaked much later, during the Black Decade when the violence, instability, and fear seemed to have no end in sight. The MSP portrayed itself as the moderate alternative to the FIS. Its cooperative relationship with the regime lent the party considerable latitude, which the MSP used to vigorously canvas and publicize. By creating its own newspaper and holding regular press conferences, its ideas on the role of women, the economy, and ijtihad on such issues, were promulgated and set discursively apart from those of the FIS. For example, the latter’s fiery, austere Ali Belhadj had announced (to the chagrin of other FIS leaders, it should be noted) that “there is no democracy in Islam,” whereas Nahnah emphasized the ideal of ‘Shuracracy,’ highlighting the democratic norms inherent in the Islamic principle of shura (consultation). He envisioned democratic processes as arbitrated by an Islamic council, with Shari’a as the basis for laws.

The MSP also set itself apart from the FIS (and from Djaballah) through an ostensibly more socially tolerant approach. It also used humor and charisma to win over youth. As one ex-member shared:

Nahnah and Bouslimani related to the common people. They didn’t wear and mandate beards. Their speeches were not high-level, if you listen to their Friday sermon or lessons in mosques, they use simple words and concepts. Nahnah even used [Algerian dialect] and told jokes. He did not have an air like other Islamists of “I am a sheikh, I speak only fus’ha.” People got attached to them, especially in such a hopeless period.

While the MSP sometimes downplayed its Islamist identity and ideas, it also moved to highlight its nationalism. “Ana mouch Islami, ana Jaza’iri,” (I’m not Islamist, I’m Algerian) remains a common refrain among MSP leaders. The experience of the Black Decade reinforced the independence-era notions of Algerian indigeneity and nationalism as cornerstones of political legitimacy, especially as the FIS and other extremist elements from the 1990s came to be retrospectively characterized as importations without basis in Algerian history or culture.27

Another MSP slogan, “maslahat al watan qabl maslahat al hizb,” (the interest of the nation before that of the party), illustrates Nahnah’s rationale, despite being an avowed opposition party, for legitimizing (by participating in) the 1997 parliamentary elections, widely seen as a completely regime-run process. The party also endorsed a referendum which would outlaw fellow Islamists of the FIS. The MSP claimed that this loyal participation in the first political process since the start of the Black Decade would help prevent state collapse.

The MSP also signaled its nationalism through the party’s adoption of state discourses on martyrdom. The status of moudjahid or chahid in the independence war still carries great symbolic weight. These individuals are celebrated widely and often, and their families receive a plethora of state benefits. For many today, these discourses on jihad and martyrdom surrounding the liberation struggle hold a continued connotation of political purity and nostalgia for a politically virtuous Algeria untouched by contemporary decay.

In 1993, Bouslimani was found murdered on the Blida mountainside. The accepted narrative was that armed militants slit his throat after he refused to grant a fatwa legitimizing their violent methods and to have the MSP boycott the national conference on the crisis.28 Bouslimani has since been rendered a martyr of the Black Decade, held up by the party as an Islamist nationalist who died defending his country against extreme Islamism—an example of the MSP’s commitment, at any cost, to moderation. Within the MSP national headquarters is a wall that commemorates members who lost their lives in the Black Decade. Nahnah’s speeches and sermons repeatedly invoked Bouslimani’s “patriotic sacrifice” (in a tradition that MSP leaders continue today), and the media widely publicized his murder. This appropriation of martyrdom allows the party to stake out a seemingly natural place among Algeria’s nationalist parties. It also helps it preempt accusations of having extra-national Islamist allegiances, and to discursively place the party on the side of the state in the state-versus-Islamist dichotomy, through which the conflict is still largely conceived.

The MSP tempered this strategy of loyalism and rhetorical support for the state with discriminating shows of opposition. Nahnah at times advocated for the implementation of a more Shari’a-compliant government and legal system, although he argued that reform needed to be incremental and gradual,29 free of conflict or subversion. While Nahnah criticized the de facto secularism of the Algerian regime, he and his contemporaries used scripture to highlight the merits of working within such a system, using as an example of prophets who cooperated with kafira (blasphemous, unfaithful) governments in order to introduce guiding changes.

In parliament, the MSP aimed to be a sort of watchdog. It focused on advancing “Islamic” agendas and sought to guide any legislation on education (especially related to Islam and the Arabic language), alcohol policy, conversion laws, and women’s policies.30 The MSP’s language policy partly resulted from a dogmatic opposition to what it held was a residual French influence in Algeria, the often-elevated status of French (at the expense of Arabic), and the attendant colonial—and secularist—baggage. Due to this balancing act over the late 1990s and early 2000s, the MSP became the biggest, most popular and pervasive Islamist party to emerge from the Black Decade. However, as we will explore below, the party’s clout in parliament has faded over the years.

Harnessing Associations

Suspicion of party politics deepened in the 2000s. Despite some electoral success in its earlier period, the MSP became increasingly considered one of Algeria’s cosmetic, coopted parties whose participation in the country’s pseudo-democratic institutions served primarily to entrench state power. Structural limitations—such as laws curbing the prerogatives of local elected governments (enhancing those of the regime-appointed walis) and a 1996 law against religious rhetoric in campaigns and platforms31—further constrained parties’ campaigns, programs and platforms, as well as their ability to respond to their local constituents. (Indeed, it was the 1996 amendment that prohibited parties from making any reference to religion, ethnicity, language or other identity-markers, that prompted the name change from Hamas to MSP.)

Nahnah died in 2003 in the immediate aftermath of the Black Decade. The relevance of the party’s raison d’être, still discursively wound up with the conflict, began to wane rapidly. Stuck in a mantra of gradualism, moderation, and why it’s not the FIS, the party seemed to have little in the way of concrete proposals on economic, social, and other policies being debated in the post-conflict period, as well as on the party’s relationship to the public now that the armed Islamists no longer loomed in the same way. And while the party had successfully mobilized under Nahnah’s cult of personality, his dominance became a liability once existing intra-party divisions—sown during MSP’s participationist period after 1997—were no longer unified under his leadership. Then, its legislative priorities stalled due to the MSP’s subordinate position in the governing coalition. The party soon saw its political legitimacy erode. Meanwhile, corruption scandals—some of the most infamous in recent memory32—rocked MSP-held ministerial positions. For many, this damaged the party’s ideological credibility; onlookers as well as the party’s own base felt it had forsaken piety for political opportunism. Party unity suffered, rival splinters multiplied, and serial defections ensued. While the MSP (and the Djaballah camp) entered the political fray subject to rising antipathy to tahazub, their own trajectory ultimately contributed to it. The small Islamist-leaning electorate, with its few cleavages and tendencies was inundated with an overwhelming number of Islamist parties. The fissiparous Islamists overcrowded the already-congested party sphere, and became an archetype of the confusion and incoherence that had come to characterize Algerian party politics.

Because of this, the MSP began to ramp up “non-partisan” activity and created its own networks and civic institutions outside the partisan sphere. Examples include Irshad wal Islah, the MSP’s official religious outreach wing (which preceded the party); Kafil Yatim, its orphan-care NGO; Jil Tarjih, its youth leadership training program; CHEMS, its official youth wing; and various local-level organizations who also undertake its da’wa (religious education) work. Members of these groups that I met were (usually young) Islamists disillusioned with politics. They re-cast their associations and re-interpreted its mission, thus also re-negotiating their own identities and affiliations.

This new strategy allowed the MSP to do two things. First, using the associational sphere allowed the movement to feign being apolitical in these spaces, and thus distance the movement from discredited party politics. The divide between the haraka (movement) and hizb (party)—the former as an arena for more authentic spirituality, leaving the messiness of politicking to the latter—is characteristic of most Brotherhood-based groups and observable throughout North Africa and the Middle East. In the Algerian context, however, the distinction between the haraka and hizb seems to be more than just this functional division of labor—emphasizing the distinction helps the MSP and other similarly-structured Islamist parties adjust to popular aversion to tahazub. Where this distaste for party politics is present even within the member base, the MSP has expanded its influence through associations and social networks that often deny any formal relations with the party itself.

Importantly, the technical border established to distinguish the MSP’s social-mobilization activities from its formal political body is not always upheld on the ground, where there is often great deal of overlap33 between the haraka and hizb. Nevertheless, the disavowal of the latter preserves organizational legitimacy, while also propagating the party’s ideology and drawing even more politically-weary recruits into the MSP.

Second, in addition to forming its own associations, the MSP has also penetrated spaces traditionally dominated by the state.34 Through this, the MSP has been able to compete with, and contest, state presence and influence. Two paradigmatic examples are in the MSP’s gradual takeover in several regions of the Algerian Muslim Scouts (SMA), and the university union scene.

Founded in 1935 under the model of the International Boy Scouts, the SMA became a key mobilizing force in the Algerian independence struggle, preparing youth, seen as “soldiers of the future,”35 ideologically, pedagogically, and militarily for the war. After independence, the SMA became an important vessel through which the FLN spread political ideas, and consolidated its grip throughout various societal strata and localities. As early as the 1980s however, the scouts began to find their ideology and societal vision, as well as their religious and organizational structure, to be much more compatible with the Islamist parties than the socially-liberalizing FLN. After the dissolution of the FIS, the scouts were coopted chiefly by the Muslim Brotherhood-leaning MSP. The young scouts began incorporating many of the MSP’s educational activities into their existing scout training, with study sessions focused additionally on the teachings of Hassan al-Banna36 and Mahfoud Nahnah. The scouts’ resources were partly allocated to them by the state. Thus, in effect, MSP’s management of hundreds of troops throughout the country became a means by which the MSP began to funnel state funds into party activities. While the MSP’s control over the scouts has declined slightly in recent years, for decades the scouts were a venue linking members and non-members, enabling the transfer of party ideas and expanding the boys’ (and to a lesser degree, girls’) network for recruitment. This allowed the MSP to compete directly with the FLN’s well-established and well-resourced patronage and recruitment networks and ideological influence.

The General Union of Free Students (UGEL) represents another example of the MSP’s efforts to contest a traditionally state-held sphere. MSP figures founded this university student union in 1989 with the stated mission of acting as an intermediary between students and the administration. It mainly led strikes for improved on-campus living conditions, but also for a more austere and religious student environment, including but not limited to mandating gender-separated cafeterias37 and opposing activities which they considered “immoral,” including dance shows and certain types of song. Such unions were also important for political parties more generally, as they provided a selection of elite, educated, involved, and professionally-trained youth—who might comprise the future elite and political class—for recruitment. UGEL also became a mechanism to monitor (and even regulate) the religious character of the student population, rendering it a tool by which the MSP surveyed and gathered information about the student constituency. To be sure, conflicts over the religious nature of the student environment at times morphed into proxy wars between UGEL and the FLN-linked National Union of Algerian Students (UNEA).

Similarly, the residence halls have become battlegrounds for the MSP and state-supported quietist Salafists. The MSP’s ideological grip, according to sociologist Mohamed Merzouk, extends overwhelmingly to university towns, wherein associative life and group activity are virtually inescapable, and further where the structure of the dorm itself has been conducive to systematic congregation and MSP (and Salafist) recruitment. The MSP and the Salafists compete not only for spatial control (mosques, prayer rooms, and dorms), but also for brokering positions in dorms’ administrative proceedings and symbolic positions as prime religious influencers over the student population.38 As they gradually became de facto players in the management of the residences, the MSP members saw to programmatic changes (in conferences, library books, posters) toward devotion to religion and faith.

Here we see why a political contender might opt for cooptation. Knowing that the political environment was hostile to more profound antisystem opposition, the party wing had opted for a strategy of loyalism, moderation, and cooperation. This less perilous option eventually conferred it some latitude (from the state) in its associational activity. With subversion out of the question, the MSP circumvented the limitations of the formal political arena instead by working through less-controlled associational avenues like the Muslim Scouts and the university spaces. The MSP was ultimately able to: encroach on the very mechanisms the state used to monopolize cultural, religious, and political codes; expedite recruitment into the movement at a time when the party base was hemorrhaging; and meet the party’s ideological mandate of incremental, bottom-up Islamization.

Muslim Brotherhood Branch

In Nahnah’s years as an Arabic professor at the University of Algiers, many of his colleagues were from the east, chiefly Egypt—and many were members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Significantly influenced by their precepts, Nahnah made several long visits to Egypt, after which he returned to Algeria to lay the foundations for his movement. The party he later formed adopted the Brotherhood’s organizational model39 and some of its religious interpretation. It adopted to a less obvious extent, the Brotherhood’s stated commitment to a pan-Islamic state with Shari’a as the basis for political and social conduct, and the parameters in the interim, for engaging with “secular entities.”

But the struggle against French colonial forces and later against “imported” extremism together bolstered the requirement of indigeneity and hypernationalism, and made being viewed as a foreign current profoundly hazardous for movements, political groups and individuals alike. Algerians view the ayad kharijiya40—the notion of a meddling foreign hand—with a collective (and institutionalized) anguish. And allegations of influence under such a hand—whether Saudi Arabia and Egypt in decades past, or Qatar and Iran more contemporarily—have especially been weaponized against Islamists in Algeria. To avert suspicions of extra-nationalist loyalty, the MSP often oscillates between emphasizing and downplaying its ties to the transnational Muslim Brotherhood, as well as broader discourses on the “global umma.”

To be sure, in private, party leaders often allude to transnationalism with an air of “if only” or “in an ideal world,” where notions of Algerian religious indigeneity are expressly interrogated. As one former MSP spokesperson put it:

Nahnah could not subscribe to the Jazara41 ideology, we cannot Algerianize our faith. This is consistent with the thought of the Ikhawan. Islam is not Algerian, Tunisian or Egyptian. Islam is universal and Algeria cannot be a reference for Islam.42

The MSP’s young ranks, for their part, appear to truly wrestle with this paradox, and can be observed constantly balancing and negotiating their notions of Islam and the umma as in fact border-transcending, and the requirement of algérianité. Thus, the movement’s appeals to indigeneity—and occasional homages to foundational Islamic thinkers who emphasized Algerian religious particularity—are probably more than just acquiescence to the state’s core principles of sovereignty.

For some readers, the spokesperson’s statement validates the trope of Islamists seeking ascendancy only to abolish the nation-state and consolidate the umma. But while MSP leaders often abstractly praise transcending tribe,43 modern borders, and other man-made constructions, they have never moved to actualize these notions. Instead, pan-Islamic aspirations are dismissed as irrelevant to the context in which they operate day-to-day. The idea of abolishing borders is described as far too lofty to warrant serious discussion, and as something that distracts from more pressing domestic issues for the movement.

Likewise, while the MSP has a more abstract affinity for and solidarity with the broader Muslim Brotherhood, various factors inform the careful ways the MSP engages its foreign Brotherhood counterparts. For instance, inspired by the successes of Tunisia’s Ennahda party, the MSP advertises the positive relationship it has with Ennahda, and it has likewise explored shedding the “Islamist” label (as Ennahda has done) as unreflective of its evolving ethos.

With regards to Egypt, while the MSP has maintained that the 2013 coup was a miscarriage of democracy by the deep state, it has restrained its rhetoric about the Sisi regime, which enjoys a generally positive relationship with the Algerian government with shared interests in military hegemony and in curbing political Islam.

The MSP’s links to Palestine’s HAMAS have been important for its credibility among its supporters. With implicit support from the Algerian government, which is more staunchly and openly pro-Palestine than its neighbors, the MSP plays up its relations with HAMAS, including by providing aid and moral support. The MSP even built the Mahfoud Nahnah High School in Gaza, named after MSP’s founder. As the situation in Gaza is important to many Algerians, playing up links to HAMAS is also an essential recruitment tool for the MSP. Abdellah Yousfi was the “Official Responsible for the Issue of Palestine,” for the Blida commune branch—a titled position that existed in all province- and commune-level MSP branches. According to Yousfi, “Hamas and MSP are the same movement, we are Hamas Algeria, they are Hamas Palestine. And Palestine is ardna [our land].”44

The wider MSP still holds up Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) as the ultimate model of modern Islamist governance, despite the AKP’s dramatic democratic regressions. MSP president Abderrazak Mokri is widely known to admire President Erdogan, and claims more ideological proximity to the AKP than to the flagship Brotherhood movement in Egypt. Indeed, Mokri in 2012 modeled the aforementioned youth leadership-training program, Jil Tarjih, off the same program he observed in the AKP. Several other MSP leaders have defended the results of the April 16, 2017 Turkish constitutional referendum, simply as the “will of the people” in interviews with the author.

The Rise of Salafism

The partisan MSP is not the only Islamic tendency affected by the antipathy to parties and political Islam in Algeria. Neither a state-created body nor a state-sanctioned party, quietist Salafism—also known as Salafiya ‘almia, or scholarly/scientific Salafism—has become an appealing alternative to youth in search of more “authentic” spiritual outlets. And unlike Brotherhood-based parties, young followers need not spend decades climbing party hierarchy. Salafism first rose in Algeria in the 1900s (indeed, Ben Badis45 was a Salafist), and then it returned again in the 1980s. Like the Islamist parties, the Salafist movement became suspect during and immediately after the Black Decade. Soon, however, quietist Salafists turned to media (i.e. internet and satellite channels) instead of the street to revamp their image, to differentiate themselves from both the political and/or jihadist Islamist elements then abounding in the country, and to recover pre-conflict levels of support.

Focusing almost entirely on da’wa, the quietist Salafists benefit from an implicit arrangement with the state that is premised on their disavowal of partisan aspiration. Their reasons for rejecting any form of political participation are not necessarily strategic, but based on a religious imperative that considers modern political systems to be bida’ (heretical innovation). ‘Quietist’ Salafists are therefore seen as unthreatening to the political status quo, and are tacitly encouraged by the state as a potential wedge against political Islam and religious parties. Their avoidance of partisanship is preferred to the more overtly political impetuses animating the latter.

This arrangement has allowed Salafists to, informally, assume control of a sizeable portion of the country’s mosques despite government funding, oversight, and the presence of state monitors. Some theories suggest that there was an unwritten deal between Salafist movement leaders and the military in the late 1990s to convince insurgents to lay down their arms and declare a ceasefire. This won the Salafis favor with the army, allowing them to expand.

Quietist Salafists have been able to generate their own commercial and patronage networks, and open their own schools. Not unlike the MSP’s associational wings, Salafists have played a growing role in Islamizing Algerian society. They dominate the hanut (small-shop) scene in the urban areas, where they are able, for example, to pressure fellow shopkeepers not to sell alcohol or tobacco. In 2010, Salafists demonstrated against a state plan to have veiled women remove headscarves in passport photographs.46 In exchange for their tacit support of the regime, they have more recently held increasing unseen sway over religious policy—one recent example, among many, being the crackdown47 on members of the Ahmadi sect that Salafists denounced as Shiite encroachment.48

Preachers like the popular Sheikh Ali Ferkous, who has a large following out of the Kouba neighborhood in Algiers, and ‘televangelists’ like now-celebrity Sheikh Chemseddine Al-Djazairi (nicknamed Chemsou),49 all belong to this quietist trend and are popular on television and radio. Chemsou’s well-known show ‘Nsahouni’ (Counsel Me) discusses a range of conservative topics, but what he, Ferkous, and other preachers often do not broach is politics, save for the occasionally implicit support given to the aging President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and the security services.

Many domestic experts see this alliance of convenience between Salafis and the state as potentially hazardous to the religious and social balance, particularly if Salafis become too empowered or large in number. Because they broadly emphasize a strict and sometimes literalist adherence to the traditions of the Salaf, some observers worry members may be more easily susceptible to other known Salafi doctrines that do endorse subversion or violence. Others are concerned that Salafis are responsible for funneling Wahhabi ideology into the country. This is far from ideal for the Algerian government, although at the moment the state appears reticent to clamp down on the religious freedoms of such a pervasive tendency—opting for strategic management rather than an eradicateur approach.

Sufi Brotherhoods

Like the Salafis, Sufi brotherhoods have come to have a larger political function in Algeria despite their outwardly apolitical character. Many play important roles in how the state attempts to manage political Islam and to maintain a monopoly over religious symbolism and power. This has not always been the case. In the past, traditional Sufi brotherhoods have been besieged, seen, especially during the Boumediène era, as threats to state consolidation, state Islam, the societal fabric, and modernizing policies. The shift from their violent repression to their cooptation and utilization occurred under President Bouteflika for several reasons.

First, many contemporary approaches in Algeria and elsewhere to countering Islamist extremism have cast Sufi brotherhoods as home-grown bulwarks whose meditation and mysticism can provide a “moderate” counterbalance to “imported” extremist ideology. In Algeria, this strategy was originally driven chiefly by domestic interests. Now, as international counterterrorism cooperation has become the key axis for Algerian engagement with the U.S. and EU, Sufi mysticism has increasingly been promoted as the panacea against extremist ideologies. Through this, the Algerian government has tried to position itself vis-à-vis its western allies as uniquely suited to handle the ideological drivers of terror and as a voice of moderate Islam. Of course, these dynamics are not unique to Algeria; Morocco and Tunisia, among many others, have also pursued similar Sufi promotion policies in tandem.50

As a result, state authorities have increasingly taken on Sufis as a loyal ally against political Islam and ‘foreign’ Wahhabi ideology.51 Through this, Sufi networks have helped to expand state influence and reach. Especially in the rural areas where Sufi zaouïas52 still have some informal clout, they help legitimize state policies, mobilize voters, and in some cases even serve as channels for government services. As such, Sufi networks aid in boosting the legitimacy of the incumbent: ahead of elections, Bouteflika53 has embarked on nationwide zaouïa-tours, getting blessings from sheikhs, paying respects at mausoleums, and making monetary donations (state largesse) with the expectation of political support. This strategy has been useful for the state not only in the countryside, but also more broadly where the optics of piety are of growing importance.

Moreover, where the Algerian government has wished to expand its regional power and influence, it has used Sufi history and networks to highlight its historic religious links to the Sahel countries in its neighborhood. For example, the League of Sahel Ulemas, created in 2013, emphasizes its Sufi history, especially the role of the Tidjaniya Order,54 as a regionally binding force.

Therefore, while the Sufis are not “partisan,” they have come to play more overtly political roles than the Salafists and are more actively leveraged by the state toward political ends. State patronage has even incentivized inter-zaouïa competition and rent-seeking behavior. Unlike the Salafist arena however, many youth disapprove of the political nature of Sufi promotion, while many others see Sufism as bida’ and not within the parameters of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence).55

Looking Ahead

Insofar as the public sees Salafis and Sufis as “apolitical” avenues for collective Islamic engagement and activism, they could further siphon popular support from the Islamist parties, and perhaps even bolster the FLN if they grow more empowered. People may become reticent about quietist Salafism, however, if its state-encouragement becomes more obvious. Such perceptions of political expediency and being extensions of the state have already somewhat sullied some of the Sufi zaouïas. Should the quietists Salafist grow too much for regime comfort, the latter will likely find a way to defang them. Right now, their expansion to the point where they might threaten the regime’s equilibrium will take time. They are locked into their dogmatic refutation of political subversion, and their evolution is closely state-monitored.

In turn, Islamist parties like the MSP see the Salafi movement and Sufi brotherhoods as two distinct threats. Among other things, Salafists threaten the MSP’s political expansion. When pious youth gravitate toward the Salafists, these potential recruits are removed altogether from the Islamist party market. The Salafist movement moreover has the capacity to galvanize devotees around a cause, a policy (though their social causes sometimes align with the MSP’s, e.g. on the family/women’s code, alcohol policy, etc.), and even political candidates—often in favor of the FLN. Thus, the contest between Salafists and Islamist parties is on display both in the rhetoric of their respective leaderships as well as in more informal spaces such as the aforementioned dorm-wars and in other da’wa efforts.

The vast majority of MSP individuals see Sufism as anathema to acceptable Islamic jurisprudence, and can often be heard deriding Sufi beliefs as folklore (though a few MSP Islamists do see Sufism as legitimate spiritual expression.) Of late however, instead of competing with Sufi influence—important in mobilizing voters—some MSP figures seek their blessings. While rare, some MSP members have joined zaouïas to get closer to regime interests—like Bouteflika. Also rare, still other Islamists join Sufi brotherhoods for more personal reasons. This suggests that MSP members adhere to religious traditions that are more eclectic than is commonly believed or let on by MSP members themselves.

Nowadays, in considering their formal political endeavors, Islamist parties have entered a period of recalculation. Empowered by the Arab uprisings that began in 2010, Mokri led the MSP’s departure from the coalition government in 2012 and formed the Islamist Green Alliance (Alliance de l’Algérie Verte, AAV) with Al-Nahda and Islah, an electoral bloc that for a time saw improved electoral numbers even in the face of breakaways.

But after four years of banal disagreements, conflicts of interest and MSP domination, the AAV was dissolved in January 2017. Ahead of the May 4, 2017 parliamentary elections, the Islamist parties announced unlikely new sets of electoral coalitions. The MSP announced a new alliance with its first, 2009 breakaway, Front for Change (FC) formed by defector Abdelmadjid Menasra56—a plan in the works since both the MSP and FC suffered additional breakaway parties in 2012 and 2013. After again coming in third place in the parliamentary election and winning only 33 seats, the MSP-FC alliance refused to join the governing coalition, citing fraud, blank ballots, and discrepancies in the final tabulations. On July 22, 2017, in an extraordinary congress, Menasra became interim president. Meanwhile, another breakaway party from the MSP-FC57 allied with Djaballah’s Adala and MSP’s own former AAV partner, Al-Nahda.

Islamists have tried to present these electoral realignments as important strides toward reunification of the broader Islamist movement, but the rival electoral blocs have only reinforced the image of Islamist disunity, as they have actively competed with one another for the same electorate.

Back in 2014, under Mokri’s leadership, the MSP co-founded the multi-partisan committee, National Coordination for Liberties and Democratic Transition (CNLTD)—a miscellany of Islamist parties, secular Berberist-oriented parties, the Workers’ Party and personalities from former governments. The bloc’s stated aim was to consolidate the opposition toward a consensus-based democratic transition, in direct response to Bouteflika’s controversial fourth mandate. The coalition aimed to effect national dialogue toward the introduction of freer elections, a system of government with checks and balances, and a new constitution. However, several important member parties defected, constrained by inter-party conflicts of interest, loss of credibility among the population, and apparently strangled by the MSP’s hegemony within the bloc.

Meanwhile, the MSP’s focus on da’wa endeavors and the associational sphere has allowed it to deal with both structural and ideational closures in political opportunity, and to compete informally with state power and presence. MSP president Mokri has also since 2012 reclaimed lost bases by traveling the country, whipping up support, and launching new party satellites and programs. But the MSP should manage expectations that these efforts will have immediate formal, electoral returns, especially as they eye the fall 2017 municipal elections with hope. While the party cries election fraud—which evidence supports—the ongoing crisis within MSP leadership cadres doesn’t help, as the likes of Boujerra Soltani and Abderrahmane Saïdi, who oppose Mokri and Menasra’s methods, hardly conceal their wishes to bring the MSP closer to the regime. The ideationally disjointed state of the country’s Islamist actors, the explosion of and divisions among indistinguishable Islamist micro-parties, the public’s progressively worsening view of the partisan and election process, compounded by a potential ascendance of Salafism and Sufism, could together continue to erode numbers for the parties.

So, Who Are the “Islamists”?

Algerians’ “imagined community”58 and national identity continues to be one bound, in part, by entrenched narratives of a shared religious background and history. And, important shifts in religious attitudes, expression and behavior are underway. By many accounts, Algerian society is increasingly “Islamizing,” despite the (apparent) collective disdain for Islamism. This is not to say Algerians are any more religious-spiritual than a decade ago, rather that outward displays of piety are of growing significance. Public attitudes are growing more socially conservative, to the extent that even the wider political class and members of the (non-Islamist) nationalist centrist parties have been progressively more conspicuous in their displays.59 Whether this is the result of: the success of the aforementioned ‘extra-institutional’ undertakings of the Islamist parties; of permeation of quietist Salafists’ doctrine backed tacitly by the state; of ubiquitous foreign religious channels; residual influence from the state-sponsored project of Islamic identity promotion and Arabization in the 1970s and 80s; more simply an organic cultural shift arising from new articulations of individual and group identity; or a combination of the above, is being critically debated.

Surely however, the understudied Algerian case compels us to rethink a few concepts. The first is the “collective” nature of Islamism. To be sure, members of a group share various interests due to what Asef Bayat calls the “imagined solidarity”60 required to galvanize a movement. But the express soul-searching among Islamist party ranks—reflective of the broader national/collective/personal identity struggles among youth and their grievances regarding both Islamism and parties—alongside differing and often competing incentive structures and allegiances among various ranking members, suggest that highly-individualized and personal factors more often shape Islamist preferences. Instead, too much weight is given to the concept, particularly in policy circles, that Islamist movements are necessarily coherent or bound by a single, defined mission.

The second concept that needs rethinking is that of political cooptation. Where state cooptation is usually imagined as something that is passively received, it can in fact be agentive. The literature on cooptation tends to focus disproportionately on the political benefits accruing to the incumbent authoritarian, casting the process as purely zero-sum. However, by vacillating between submitting to the state in certain public and formal institutions, and contesting it in certain extra-institutional or associational realms, Islamist parties in Algeria have retained some agency—as we have seen, in some spaces even disrupting power asymmetries—over the course of their incorporation.

Finally, the case of Algeria (indeed it is not the only one) pushes us to reconsider what constitutes Islamism. It feels counterintuitive to characterize quietist Salafists and Sufi brotherhoods as “Islamist” per its conventional definitions, since for them politics (often, though not always) are a means to secure their religious and ideological ends, as opposed to the other way around. For the quietist Salafis, capturing the state truly seems not to be the end goal. But, as there is no “politics” without a polity, such groups are nevertheless effecting changes in the state even if they don’t actively confront it, or try to contest or seize it; their activities shape the electorate, its social and political preferences, and by extension, the political/policy milieu. Thus, when the Algerian case is cast as another example of the “failure of Islamism,” it elides the informal spaces where contestations of political-religious authority occur. Islamism is far from dead in Algeria; it may change shape yet in the years to come, but it will remain a fixture in Algerian social and political life.

About the author:
*Vish Sakthivel,
Robert A. Fox Fellow, Foreign Policy Research Institute

Source:
This article was published by the Hudson Institute’s Current Trends in Islamist Ideology.

Notes:
1 Vish Sakthivel, “Algeria’s Growing Security Problems,” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, PolicyWatch 2791, (April 2017).

2 This paper is based on interviews I conducted from 2015 to 2017 with leading figures in the MSP and successive parties, as well additional interviews and observing members of the rank and file from 2015 to 2016, as well as Salafi youth and young members of Sufi brotherhoods. I also analyzed newspaper archives from the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.
3 Ben Badis founded the famed Algerian Association of Muslim Ulema (AUMA) which emphasized the need to return to an authentic Algerian Muslim way of life that would empower native Algerians and effect progress—a goal the AUMA and Ben Badis held as inextricable from reclaiming an Algerian nation. Indeed, Ben Badis did not originally take issue with French colonial presence, but rather its ownership of Muslim patrimony and management of Muslim institutions; despite maintaining it was chiefly cultural/religious, AUMA’s demands were highly political, which gave way to more subversive tendencies within the organization whose subsequent movement empowered the ensuing Algerian nationalism and the independence war.
4 Initially, Ben Badis’ AUMA focused on establishing religious schools and youth clubs—avoiding political rhetoric and not contesting French rule. The AUMA’s subsequent repression at the hands of French authorities changed this. Despite having maintained until now that it was chiefly cultural and religious, AUMA’s demands became more politicized, campaigning for equality of status between ‘Arabs’ and the French, and officialization of the Arabic language. Ben Badis rejected assimilation, and sought to promote notions of a distinct Algerian identity, which could only be articulated through the Muslim character of the full ‘indigenous’ population vis-à-vis the colonizers. His emphasis on indigenous cultural identity appealed to organizing nationalists.
5 See M’hand Berkouk (1998) The Algerian Islamic Movement from Protest to Confrontation: A Study in Systemic Conflagrations. Intellectual Discourse, 6(1), 39-65.
6 These were the religious vestiges within the FLN from Ben Badis’ AUMA (Algerian Association of Muslim Ulema).
7 Including Bachir Ibrahimi—leader of the Ulama, successor to Ben Badis—and his colleagues Abdelatif Soltani and Ahmed Sahnoun. Ibrahimi was critical of the government’s ideological and policy decisions since independence and denounced what he saw as its departure from the Islamic principles enshrined in the bayan 1 Novembre and for which hundreds of thousands of Algerians died. He penned a letter to then president Ben Bella and company to embrace shura (consultation) for a more equal polity. For this he was condemned to house arrest where he remained until his death in 1965. For more on this, see Berkouk (1998).
8 M’hand Berkouk (1998) The Algerian Islamic Movement from Protest to Confrontation: A Study in Systemic Conflagrations. Intellectual Discourse, 6(1), 39-65.
9 Established in 1963, it combined the ideas of Ben Badis’ AUMA with influences external to Algeria, including some Muslim Brotherhood doctrine. Al-Qiyam was banned after criticizing Egypt’s execution of Sayyid Qutb.
10 Many of these parties grew out of the eruption of religious and civic organizations that took place in the previous decade.
11 As well as to counter some rising Berberist and leftist opposition.
12 Whether these two were the ‘true leaders’ or simply the de facto faces of the movement at the time, is contested by today’s ex-FIS leadership now in exile in various parts of Europe and the United States.
13 There is plausible evidence that the Algerian military at this time carried out attacks on civilians under the guise of the hardline armed Islamist factions, precisely to build anti-Islamist sentiment and garner support for its eradicateur counter-terror approach.
14 Eradicateurs were the hardliners among the security, military and political apparatus who refused compromise with armed Islamist factions, refused negotiation with their leaders, and argued they should be dealt with only by forceful elimination. This is in contrast to the ‘conciliateurs’ (sometimes called dialoguistes) who promoted national dialogue and reconciliation.
15 One must also qualify the ‘unanimity’ of the apparent popular consensus that the 1992 coup was a positive development and that the population uniformly reviles the FIS. This narrative has been mediated by the Algerian regime, state media, and peers who circulate the same reinforcing notions, regardless of whether they actually believe them. Thus, many Algerians may feel inclined to conceal or falsify their opinions about the coup, the FIS, and other political preferences.
 16 Andrea Liverani refers to this phenomenon as Algeria’s “hyperpluralism” in his 2008 work, Civil Society in Algeria: The Political Functions of Associational Life (Abingdon: Routledge.)
17 Jane E. Goodman (2013) The Man Behind the Curtain: Theatrics of the State in Algeria. The Journal of North African Studies, 18(5), 779-795.
18 For more on this reconstitution, and the contemporary power contests between the executive and the military nodes of the Pouvoir, see Vish Sakthivel, “As the Bouteflika Era Ends, Crisis or Continuity for Algeria?” World Politics Review (October 2016). www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/20203/as-the-bouteflika-era-ends-crisis-or-continuity-for-algeria
19 Before the 1990s conflict, the state had far more legitimacy, using aphorisms, religious practice, pledges of national allegiance and any participation in national/nationalistic as well as metaphysical tradition, cult of leadership, mythology, and other value systems to engender notions of state rajla (manliness).
20 The Concorde Civile announced by then-new president Abdelaziz Bouteflika—while controversial—absolved repentant Islamists involved in the conflict, reintegrated them into society (so long as they had not been accused of murder or rape), and effectively ended the war, with an 85 percent turnout and 98 percent voting in favor in the referendum.
21 An influential figure in the academic Islamic circles of the eastern region around Constantine, Djaballah galvanized the earliest followers and party cadres in this region, having less influence over the west or the south.
22 Then-secretary general Lahbib Adami and his entourage looked to pursue incorporation into the government, to seek cabinets by allying with the RND party. At the 1998 party congress, Adami was elected as party president, ejecting Djaballah, who in 1999, founded Islah in an effort to recreate the party with a sort of oppositional virginity, and continue on his path of moderate non-participation.
23 Djaballah founded his third party, al-Adala after he was jettisoned again in 2007 from Islah by its secretary general, Djahid Younsi (again, not without encouragement from the deep state). After this, Islah has struggled to attract support in the absence of Djaballah’s cachet. Unlike Nahnah, Djaballah perhaps suffered having not generated the same cult of loyalty, nor did he have the gravitas of the same venerated death that would hold future cadres fast to his ideology.
24 This refers to the strain of Djaballah’s Brotherhood-based doctrine which has its origins in the eastern region of Algeria, around Constantine and Skikda.
25 At one point the new Islah party did so well that in 2002, it displaced the MSP as Algeria’s leading Islamist group (a development not lacking the regime’s encouragement) in parliament winning 43 seats out 389, versus the MSP’s 38 seats. Some understood this to be the Islamist electorate’s rewarding of Djaballah’s thus far principled non-participation, which had grown wary of the MSP’s slow cooptation. This compounded the MSP’s already lesser role to the FLN and the RND in the coalition. In 2007, however, the MSP rose to 52 seats, again dislodging rival Islamist al-Islah, following that party’s implosion.
26 Belmehdi’s role continues to be contested—while some hold he was indeed a co-founder, others within the party allege he was too young to be as versed as Nahnah and Bouslimani and was simply “in the room,” when decisions were made regarding the movement’s direction.
27 But this of course is a matter of discourse. In fact, many of the more moderate/nationalist elements within the FIS were formed of individuals from “Jazara,” (the “Algerianists”), who were influenced by Islamic thinker Malek Bennabi, who held that Algerian society, Islamist or otherwise, was too fixated on adopting foreign models, misguided as they ignored the spiritual foundations of their own society. They reject the “Jazara” label however, as it was used pejoratively by the MSP’s Mahfoud Nahnah, who in fact disliked their promotion of Algerian religious particularity and their rejection of Eastern, pan-Islamic notions.
28 OJAL, the Organization of Free Algerian Youth, a violent, vigilante anti-Islamist militia—believed by some to be a front for the DRS to slaughter Islamists (and suspected Islamists) with impunity—also claimed responsibility for his murder. The DRS itself is also sometimes thought to have been involved, although this remains very difficult to corroborate among the many conspiracy theories that abound on such topics.
29 These terms “marhali, tadriji” are used by Nahnah himself in interviews on his group’s goals.
30 Bouteflika upon re-election in 2004 planned to amend the 1984 Family Code to enhance women’s rights in the issues of divorce, citizenship, marital guardianship (wali), custody following a divorce, inheritance, and in polygamy, after years of criticism by feminist groups and secular parties calling for it to be in greater accordance with international norms. However, when amendments were ultimately passed in March 2005, reforms were far more restrained than in initial proposals (leading many feminists to criticize it as chiefly cosmetic and intended for international audiences). They were seen as concessions to Islamist parties whose approval Bouteflika sought on the forthcoming Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation in September 2005. Indeed, the Charter was a substantially larger priority for the state than the liberalization of the laws concerning women.
31 In 1996, the state looked to scale back some party liberties—framed as having originally imperiled the state. A constitutional amendment went into effect in November 2016, and among its many provisos, was a stipulation on voting and campaign laws in the revised Article 42: “political parties may not be founded on a religious, linguistic, racial, gender, corporatist or regionalist basis. Political parties may not resort to partisan propaganda on the elements mentioned.”
32 MSP vice-president and MP, Boujerra Soltani, was implicated in several scandals, the most sordid in 2003 where approximately USD1,500,000,000 worth of public funds (as well as housing and land) were embezzled through Rafik Khalifa’s private investment bank. Soltani exploited his position as Minister of Labor and Social Security to approve the government-run social security funds to invest 10 billion Algerian dinars in Khalifa’s bank, marking one of its largest transactions ever. The testimonies among the hundreds accused of investing public monies to generate kick-back, implicated Soltani as well as the erstwhile head of the powerful General Union of Algerian Workers (UGTA). See “Le point du samedi: L’éthique à l’épreuve de la corruption” El Watan, May 22, 2005, and “Algérie: procès de Rafik Khalifa, acte II” Jeune Afrique, April 1, 2013.
33 Indeed, instead of occurring as a real procedural delineation as is the intention, the distinction is more a syntactic sleight of hand: numerous members and leaders of the MSP refer to it as ‘haraka’ even when referring to its more ostensible politicking: the party’s parliamentary participation, in its involvement in the Green Alliance, and other opposition umbrella movements.
34 Or state-linked interests.
35 Kaddache, M (2003) “Les soldats de l’avenir: Les Scouts musulmans algériens (1930-1962)” CAIRN: De l’Indochine à l’Algérie, 68-77.
36 Egyptian founder of the flagship Muslim Brotherhood in 1928.
37 “L’Extremisme Religieux s’installe dans le Campus,” El Watan, March 17, 2009.
38 See Mohamed Merzouk (2012) Les nouvelles formes de religiosité juvénile: enquête en milieu étudiant. Insaniyat (55:56), 121-131.
39 The MSP has a rigid organizational hierarchy. Some local and province level follows this more strictly than others. At the base of the pyramid is the individual (fard), followed by a family (‘ousra) comprised of about seven persons under the authority of an educator (mourabbi), whose role is to conduct the group prayers and study sessions. Above the ‘ousra, is the mujmu’a (group) consisting of between five and eight ‘ousras. Between two and four mujmu’at come under the maktab beladi (the commune-level bureau), the official local headquarters of the party. The mourabbi is typically a member of the maktab beladi, beyond which is the maktab wilayi’i (the province-level bureau).
 40 The term “main étrangère” in French is also common.
41 Influenced by the thinker Malek Bennabi who favored focus on indigenous spiritually, the Jazara were typically elite, highly educated, often rich, and intellectually versed in the Quran, unlike the more demagogic Belhadjes of the FIS. They aimed to ‘Algerianize’ Islam without borrowing from external interpretations (Wahhabism in Saudi, or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.) By some accounts, including those of some ex-members of the Jazara I interviewed, they were mistaken to enter the FIS.
42 Interview with Sid Ahmed Boulil, former MP and former MSP spokesperson, Le Golfe, Algiers, October 22, 2015
43 In fact, at the time of writing, the party itself has three region/tribe-based poles of power: Mokri from the Msila region (representing the camp focused on creating the semblance of opposition), that of Soltani leading the Tebessa region, and Saïdi from the center, (Algiers/Blida group) (the latter two wish to maintain their previous closeness to the state, retain access to ministries of interest, and leverage these interests to expand the party). Despite Mokri’s 2012 defeat of Soltani in the party election, Soltani and Saïdi retain substantial influence and veto, and lead their own sub-constituencies within the party. Indeed, many attribute Soltani’s electoral success at the 2008 party congress to regionalist mobilization within the party, with support stemming from the influential Nemamcha Brarsha tribe of Chaoui Berbers from his home region of Tebessa.
44 Interview with Abdellah Yousfi, former Official for the Palestinian Issue, and president of Blida province branch, MSP Blida Province Headquarters, December 12, 2015.
45 Influenced by the Salafi movement in Tunisia, Ben Badis called for the purification of Islamic practice in Algeria toward a return to the original Muslim leaders (Salaf), which he, ironically used as a launch-pad to attack the French-administered official imams. He soon after founded the AUMA (see endnote 3).
46 “Hardline Islam steps out of shadows in Algeria,” Reuters, August 10, 2010.
47 “L’Ahmadiya, l’islam interdit!” El Watan, April 12, 2017.
48 Some observers believe this crackdown is opportunistic, serving to distract from the economic crisis.
49 Previously named Chemseddine Bouroubi, he once headed up an independent, successful, Islamist charity which was heavily repressed, and eventually dissolved by the state.
50 For more on the phenomenon of Sufi promotion in Morocco and Algeria, see Vish Sakthivel “The Flawed Hope of Sufi Promotion in North Africa”, Foreign Policy Research Institute, December 19, 2016, http://www.fpri.org/article/2016/12/flawed-hope-sufi-promotion-north-africa/.
51 Even though there are individuals within Islamist parties who themselves are purported to have mystical practices, including Boujerra Soltani, former head of the MSP.
52 This term has several definitions, however in North Africa, it most often refers to Sufi lodges where religious training and education occur, usually organized around a specific Sufi order (tariqa).
53 It is important to of course note that figures can have personal sympathies for Sufism. Bouteflika’s mother was purportedly an active member of a zaouïa, and it is rumored that Bouteflika increasingly turned to Sufism after the onset of his illness around 2005.

54 There is disagreement between Morocco and Algeria—a result of the arms-race between the two countries for regional influence—as to the birthplace of this order; Morocco holds that it is in Fez, while Algeria argues it is in Ain Madhi.[55] See Khemissi, Larémont, and Taj Eddine (2012) Sufism, Salafism and state policy towards religion in Algeria: a survey of Algerian youth. Journal of North African Studies (17:3), 547-558.

55 See Khemissi, Larémont, and Taj Eddine (2012) Sufism, Salafism and state policy towards religion in Algeria: a survey of Algerian youth. Journal of North African Studies (17:3), 547-558.
56 Leveraging member disillusionment with party opportunism, loss of virtue, and poor performance in policy and reform, Menasra, then-VP of the MSP majlis shoura took a swathe of MSP members with him into the FC.
57 The National Edification Movement (NEM) was a breakaway from the FC, formed in 2013—notably Mustapha Belmehdi and a few other former MSP heavyweights (whose departure from the MSP was considered to have severely degraded the MSP’s claim to be the inheritor of Nahnah’s original vision). According to Menasra, Belmehdi et al. constituted the most ‘extreme elements’ of FC, opposed to any dialogue with the MSP or any reconciliation.
 58 As articulated by Benedict Anderson in his seminal 1983 book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
59Many of the female candidates who refused to show their faces on the campaign lists for the May 4, 2017 legislative elections, were not in fact from the Islamist parties, but from the more centrist parties. And one can find many individuals with conservative Islamist leanings within the FLN and RND.
60 Asef Bayat (2005) Islamism and Social Movement Theory. Third World Quarterly, 26(6), p. 902.

Russia’s Foray Into The Balkans: Who Is Really To Blame? – Analysis

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By Dimitar Bechev*

(FPRI) — “There are three hundred million of us,” people in Montenegro once boasted. “Together with the Russians,” they would hasten to add. The tiny state, tucked between the Adriatic Sea and the Dinaric Alps and whose population is a little over 600,000, long has claimed a special relationship with faraway Russia. Peter the Great provided stipends to the Montenegrin prince-bishop in the 1710s. In 1904, as an expression of gratitude and as sign of solidarity with the Tsarist Empire, Montenegro declared war on Japan. Today, throngs of well-heeled Russian tourists populate the cafes of Montenegro’s glitzy coastal towns in the summer. But now, Russia is sowing deep divisions in the Balkan republic, which, on June 5 this year, became the latest country to join NATO.

Mere weeks after joining the Alliance, a trial opened in Podgorica, the capital city, against 14 former and current security operatives accused of plotting a coup on the eve of the parliamentary elections in October 2017. Their goal was to derail NATO accession. Among the defendants are two Russian citizens allegedly affiliated with the GRU (Russia’s military intelligence) and nine individuals from neighboring Serbia, including Ret. Gen. Bratislav Dikić, a former gendarmerie commander. Dikić faces charges of masterminding the assassination of Prime Minister Milo Djukanović, the country’s long-standing leader who at one time had extensive business links to Russia. The pro-Russian and anti-NATO opposition says the alleged coup attempt is a fabrication by the authorities to silence critics.

Montenegro, together with the rest of former Yugoslavia, has now become an arena of contest between Russia and the West. Visiting Podgorica in August 2017, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence put it starkly: “As you well know, Russia continues to seek to redraw international borders by force. And here, in the Western Balkans, Russia has worked to destabilize the region, undermine your democracies, and divide you from each other and from the rest of Europe.” His words echo the Obama administration’s rhetoric. “Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, other places. They’re all in the firing line [together with] Georgia, Moldova, Transnistria,” stated former Secretary of State John Kerry before the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee on February 24, 2015.

European dignitaries, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel or High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini, have also sounded alarms about Russia’s mischief making. But there is a risk of seeing the Balkans solely through a geopolitical lens, especially if it encourages the European Union and United States to ignore governance failures that are the main drivers of the region’s problems—and which opens the door for further Russian meddling.

Finding Russia at Every Corner

Western media coverage is on the same wavelength. Journalists and pundits tend to find Russia at every corner. Thus, street protests in Macedonia triggered in 2015 by high-level graft and abuse of power have been cast as an episode in the standoff between pro-Western forces and a government in cahoots with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin has an old grudge against the West dating back to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, we are told. He is simply paying back Europeans and Americans for the humiliation Russia—and the Orthodox world at large—suffered during the 1999 bombing of Serbia, it is often argued.

Russia itself feeds narratives of victimhood and retribution. Its Foreign Ministry blasted the color revolutionaries in Skopje as American stooges challenging a legitimate government and pandering to extremism, which Russia argues is the Western strategy of choice, from Kosovo to Syria to Ukraine. Yet, Russia is up to more than just propaganda to make the U.S. and EU look bad. Macedonian officials note that Russia has doubled the staff of its embassy in Skopje in past years. It is anyone’s guess how many of the new appointees are also on assignment to one of the several security agencies that jostle for influence and resources in Moscow.

Macedonia, which has now taken a pro-Western turn after a new coalition government assumed office in May 2017, is small fry compared to next-door Serbia, which, in some ways, is Russia’s closest friend in the former Yugoslavia (outmatched only by Bosnia’s Republika Srpska region). Formally committed to a policy of neutrality, Belgrade cooperates on security and defense with Moscow. Russia is donating to Serbia six MiG-29 fighter jets, 30 T-72 tanks, and other military hardware. Since 2008, Gazpromneft controls oil and gas  company NIS, the country’s largest business entity. Vladimir Putin and Russia enjoy high public opinion ratings, rivaled only by those of President Aleksandar Vučić. Serbia has been courting Russian investment, refusing to join the Western sanctions imposed in 2014 over the annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine. “Russia is back to the Balkans,” many people say.

Russia in the Balkans

Yet, Russia is not returning to the Balkans because it never left. Under President Boris Yeltsin, Moscow claimed a role in the conflicts in Bosnia (1992-5) and Kosovo (1998-9). What was at stake, in the eyes of Yeltsin and Foreign Ministers Andrei Kozyrev and Evgeny Primakov, was not just the Balkans, but the European security order. Lacking the diplomatic heft of military strength to match the West, Russia was bound to suffer one setback after the other. Even worse, it became prey to wily and self-serving politicians like Slobodan Milošević who was keen to cling to power by playing off external powers.

Curiously enough, it was Putin who pulled Russian blue helmets from Kosovo and Bosnia in 2003, seeing such entanglements as a liability. Russia was to make a comeback in the mid-2000s, this time as an energy superpower, rather than a conflict manager. The wider region of Southeast Europe (former Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, and Turkey) became central to the strategy of bypassing Ukraine as a conduit for natural gas shipments to the EU. Multibillion dollar projects such as the ill-fated South Stream gas pipeline became the flagship of Russia’s policy, with Putin taking personal charge. Energy underscored the interdependent relationship between Russia and Europe, notwithstanding disagreements on crucial issues such as the status of Kosovo.

The clash with the West over Ukraine ushered in a new phase of the Russian involvement in Southeast Europe. A regulatory dispute with the European Commission led to the cancellation of South Stream, while the seizure of Crimea, the war in the Donbas, along with the sanctions they triggered turned relations between Russia and the West zero-sum. We are now in an altogether new stage defined by Moscow’s low-intensity campaign against EU and NATO in the region. When Romania and Bulgaria joined the NATO in 2004, followed by Croatia and Albania five years later, Russia kept a low profile. From its perspective, there was no harm in having more Russia-friendly countries like Bulgaria and even Slovenia and Croatia in Western clubs. Now, by contrast, any gain for the West counts as a loss for Russia, and vice versa. And the Kremlin has a blunt message to the EU and NATO: “You mess in our backyard, we stir things up in yours.” For every Moldova, there’s a Montenegro. For every Ukraine, there is a Serbia.

Spoiler tactics are an indirect recognition that Moscow plays second fiddle to the West. The Balkans is not part of the “sphere of privileged interests” Russia claims in the former Soviet Union. While Russia, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, gets a say in hotspots such as Kosovo and, especially, Bosnia, no core national interests are involved in either. Unlike NATO, Russia has no boots on the ground. Other than imports of natural gas and crude oil, economic relations are not extensive. On average, Russia accounts for about 10% of imports and a meagre 1.5% of exports. Even for a country such as Serbia, which benefits from a free-trade agreement with the Russian Federation, the percentage of exports was 5.4% in 2015.  In comparison, the EU generates about two-thirds of the trade flowing in and out of the Balkans (both member states and EU accession candidates). The Eurasian Economic Union (EEU)—Putin’s pet integration project—is not going to enlarge to the Balkans anytime soon.

Russian in Domestic Balkan Affairs

At the same time, Russia has both the means and the will to infiltrate domestic politics in these countries. The list of allies and fellow travellers is long: pro-Kremlin opinion makers, Russophile parties, prominent clerics, civic groups, and media outlets (some with murky funding sources). High-level Russian companies like Gazprom or Lukoil can be mobilized if need be. Do not forget the free-lance purveyors of Russian soft power, always on the lookout for opportunities to indulge the Kremlin and curry favor. Consider, for example, “Orthodox oligarch” Konstantin Malofeev, who is currently under Western sanctions over his role in the early stages of the so-called “Russian Spring” in the Donbas in 2014. Malofeev’s Balkan connections allegedly laid the groundwork for the coup in Montenegro, with the GRU taking over the operation later on.

Grassroot support for Russia in the region is particularly important. Popular sympathy reflects historical memories or the recognition of religious and cultural bonds, but also resentments of more recent vintage. In Serbia, Republika, Greece, Bulgaria, and Montenegro, there are plenty who scapegoat the U.S. and EU for all manner of sins: from siding with Balkan Muslims during the Yugoslav wars, to austerity in the wake of the global financial crisis, to the influx of asylum seekers from Syria and Iraq, to the end of the good old days of communism. The media readily caters to those narratives.

Conversely, Putin’s Russia is often portrayed as a knight in shining armor on a mission to right past wrongs and exact punishment on the perfidious West. Russia is also celebrated as generous: a survey in Serbia from 2015 found that 47% of respondents believed that Russia provides more financial aid than EU. In truth, it lags far, far behind. Whereas the EU contributed €3.5 billion in grants between 2000 and 2013 alone, Russia has only committed to extend a loan of $338 million to the Serbian railways. Even distant Japan has given more.

Don’t Overestimate Russia’s Influence

 There is a catch, however. Polls in Serbia indicate that even those who harbor admiration for Russia would rather go to the West for employment, education, or tourism. An IPSOS survey of 18-35 year olds from 2016 found out that the U.S. and EU remain the prime reference points when it comes to popular culture, lifestyle, fashion, sports, etc. Russia is barely visible. While 64% of respondents support an alliance with Moscow and 57% favor Russian military bases in Serbia, more than two-thirds prefer to pursue education and to find work in the West. Knowledge of Russian society, domestic politics and culture, as well as Russian language, is scant. In Bulgaria, a majority sees Russia in a favorable light, but two-thirds would vote to stay in EU and NATO in a hypothetical referendum.

Popularity, however, is different from influence. Juggling the East and the West is an old tradition in this part of Europe, with memories of Josip Broz Tito’s diplomatic artistry still fresh. It is hard to find a mainstream politician in the Balkans who would choose Russia over the EU, if they must make an either-or choice. Politicians benefit from their inclusion in a Brussels-centric web of institutions and policies, but also strike advantageous side deals with the Russians. And who can blame them? In this respect, Balkan leaders are little different from Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, Viktor Orbán of Hungary, or, for that matter, former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder who recently landed a cushy job on the board of Russian energy giant, Rosneft.

Good Governance Will Limit Russian Meddling

 Just as Russia exploits its Balkan assets, local wheelers and dealers use Russia, too. They have their own, often parochial, priorities: outmanoeuvring domestic opponents, acquiring funds and distributing them to political clienteles, and acquiring extra bargaining chips vis-à-vis the EU and the U.S. Moscow’s presence in the region is a gift for these Balkan elites. The Russian menace blunts external pressure for political and institutional change. The EU’s mission to promote the rule of law and accountable governance is not what the region’s power holders are about. They are all too happy to talk Europe’s talk, but walking the walk is another matter, particularly if it means giving up control and resources—and, in extreme cases such as the former prime minister of Croatia Ivo Sanader, serving jail time.

But when there is a geopolitical challenger, the West’s focus shifts from transformation to stability. That is why the EU, as well as the U.S., seems prepared to cut some slack to Balkan leaders to ensure they don’t fall into Russia’s lap. The scarier Putin is, the more leeway Balkan wannabe-Putins have.

This is not to trivialize the challenge: Russia’s disruptive impact is real. Yet, the root of the problem is not the Kremlin, much less Russian imperial designs targeting South Slavs or Orthodox-majority lands. Local conditions and forces matter most. It was not Putin who created state capture, clientelism, corruption, militant nationalism, and xenophobia in Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, or Montenegro. Russia cannot be held responsible for the bloodshed of the 1990s, which poisons Balkan politics to this day. Local pathologies amplify Moscow’s influence and advance its goal of subverting the Western-led order in Europe and beyond.

About the author:
*Dr. Dimitar Bechev
is a research fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Senior Nonresident Fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

Palestine: Hamas And Fatah To Unite After 10-Year Split – OpEd

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Unity talks and the deal

It looks a new era has set in the life of Palestinians for their better future as the two political factions — Fatah and Hamas — have decided at long last to come together after 10 long years of fighting that helped the Israel regime to accelerate its military fascism over the besieged Palestinians, killing them in a sustained manner, including children and women mercilessly.

The ruling Palestinian Hamas has strongly backed a plan to begin reconciliation with its rival, Fatah, on October 12 after more than a decade at loggerheads that left the Palestinian territories split between competing leaderships. The deal mediated by Egypt, followed the historic visit by Fatah Palestine’s PM Rami Hamdallah, made to the Gaza Strip on Oct. 2, marking a move toward reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. He made the trip only after Hamas asked the unity government to take control and dissolved its governing administration.

At a brief ceremony at the headquarters of Egypt’s General Intelligence Service, which shepherded the negotiations, representatives from Hamas and Fatah kissed and embraced amid a smattering of applause from Egyptian and Palestinian officials gathered around them.

The signing ceremony followed two days of talks mediated by Egypt’s General Intelligence Service. The deal was signed by the deputy leader of Hamas, Saleh al-Arouri, and Azzam al-Ahmad, the head of the Fatah delegation. Officials from both sides offered frank appraisals of the issues that divide them, and that could easily scupper this latest effort. Ayman Rigib, a Fatah negotiator in Cairo, pointed to the status of Hamas’s Qassam Brigades, with an estimated 20,000 fighters, and Hamas’s extensive tunnels.

The split began when Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006 in Palestine, leading to bloody gun battles on the streets of Gaza when Fatah did not cede power. Elections of Hamas were not approved by the USA and Israel. Since then, Hamas has run the Gaza Strip, while Fatah has administered parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank through the Palestinian Authority.

There have been several abortive attempts at unity over the past 10 years. But after the two sides agreed to form a unity government three years ago, Hamas continued to run Gaza through a shadow government. When leaders from Hamas and Fatah signed the 2011 deal, Abbas said, “We have turned the black page of division forever.” But the agreement quickly foundered amid opposition from Israel, which denounced it as a “victory for terrorism.” That did not hold.

This time, a broad Arab coalition is backing the deal, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. “This merger is going to cost a lot of money, and they will help us financially,” said Ahmed Yousef, an adviser to the Hamas leader Ismail Haniya, referring to Emirati and Saudi support. “The Egyptians also clearly got a green light from America. They are obviously trying to cook up something to help end this conflict.”

Some Palestinian officials say that the conditions are more conducive to reconciliation. The deal stipulates that a unity government formed in 2014 and led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Egypt’s State Information Service said that the rivals had agreed to hand full control of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority by Dec. 1. Palestinian officials said that if the process goes well, Mr. Abbas could visit Gaza in the coming month, his first visit to the embattled coastal strip in a decade.

Egypt has set Nov. 21 for the next step of the process: a meeting in Cairo of all Palestinian factions that, it hopes, will be the start of talks toward a Palestinian unity government. Some Palestinian officials said they hoped such a government could be formed by January. But much depends on how things transpire in Gaza over the coming weeks.

Under terms of the deal, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority will form a joint police force of at least 5,000 officers, and merge their ministries. One Hamas official said they would negotiate to slim down the bloated civil service, cutting up to 40,000 of the 200,000 jobs. Two elements of the deal promise to quickly ease conditions in Gaza, which aid organizations have called an emerging humanitarian crisis.

Abbas’s Fatah party will run the Gaza Strip until a new government is formed before the end of the year. But thorny obstacles blocking past unity bids — including the fate of Hamas’s powerful armed wing — have not yet been discussed.

Officials from both sides described a series of agreed measures that are due to unfold in the coming weeks, and which they say will both sideline However, the Palestinians did not release the text of the agreement, and there was no mention of the thorny issues that remain unresolved, such as the fate of the main Hamas militia if any, or the network of tunnels if any under Gaza used by fighters and weapons smugglers. Hamas from the day-to-day running of Gaza and create a political groundswell for a broader deal to reunite the Palestinian territories.

The deal set a February deadline for merging employees belonging to the Palestinian Authority in Gaza with those of Hamas’ government, Palestinian officials said that the deal paves the way for PLO chief Abbas to visit Gaza for the first time in a decade. A committee will be formed to merge thousands of Palestinian Authority security personnel into Hamas’s police force. The Palestinian Authority has agreed to lift sanctions that it imposed on Gaza this year as part of its effort to pressure Hamas into talks.

Palestinians want the blockades of Israel and Egypt removed once and for all to allow free movement of Palestinians. Sources say that the control of the Palestinian side of the Erez border crossing with Israel will be handed to the Palestinian Authority, while the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing with Egypt will be ceded to Abbas’s presidential guard. The opening of the Rafah crossing would ease pressure on Palestinians in Gaza, only a tiny percentage of whom receive permission from Israel to leave the enclave for treatment in Israel. While Israel has perpetually closed the blockade for enacting collective punishment on Palestinians, Egypt has only sporadically opened its border in recent years.

The Fatah government harmed the Gaza people; it cut electricity supplies to a few hours a day in Gaza and stopped paying government salaries, an important source of income in a besieged territory with a broken economy. And Hamas will cede control of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, Gaza’s main lifeline to the outside world. That would allow Egypt to ease stringent cargo restrictions and enable Gazans to travel outside; perhaps the most significant change in the agreement. But even if the two sides succeed in fully reuniting in the next round of talks, the new arrangement seems unlikely to improve relations with Israel, which has warned that it could not accept a unity government that included Hamas.

Hamas has insisted on its right to maintain control of its defensive arsenal — including thousands of rockets, missiles and drones — as well as its militia and its network of fortified tunnels.

Across divided Palestine there were cautious celebrations. In Gaza City, vendors passed out sweets to children in Soldier’s Square, a park at the center of town. Mona Khfaja, 37, a pharmacist who said she was unable to leave Gaza to seek treatment for kidney disease, said dissatisfaction with the crushing border restrictions had forced warring Palestinian leaders to the negotiation table. “We do not want the flags of Fatah and Hamas, only the Palestinian flag,” she said.

Palestine requires one unified army and one unified police for both territories. Only Palestine authorities should collect taxes for speedy payment for the employees and for other services.

Israel caused split

Of course, the USA-UK imperialist twins are directly responsible the pathetic life and poor fate of the Palestinians who are now treated by Israel as if they were slaves. The USA endorses all criminal operations of Israel inside Palestine and shields attacks on Palestinians and other Arabs by using the UN veto.

Israel behaves big in the Middle East and indirectly threatens people with its nuclear weapons. It is the cause of the Palestinian split and their civil war, killing each other, while the Israeli military also does the same by targeting the besieged people of Palestine as its prerogative.

The USA and Israel have played havoc in the lives of Palestinians by first splitting them into the Fatah-Hamas political factions and then making them fight each other, killing many. When the USA and Israel were talking about two-state solution, they apparently referred to Gaza and the West Bank, and really Israel and Palestine.

Meanwhile, Israeli objections also have the potential to derail unity efforts, if Palestine leaders do not use their brains. Hawkish Israeli PM Netanyahu, seeking to avoid any promise on the establishment of Palestine, said Israel opposes any reconciliation deal between Hamas and Fatah. The USA-Israel duo wants the divide intact just like Sunni-Shiia split.

Israel keeps increasing its terror infrastructure by adding fresh terror goods got from the USA and select EU nations – but wants the ruling Hamas party to be disarmed and “end its war to destroy Israel.” Netanyahu said reconciliation makes “peace much harder to achieve.”

Israel has just one composite agenda: to kill Palestinians, divide them, make them kill each other, territorial expansionism for building illegal settlements in Palestine. With US backing the Israeli regime has pursed this strategy rather successfully by erecting a terror wall to target the Palestinians through blockades.

In Gaza, hope is dampened by the memory of previous failed negotiation efforts. Hopelessness is harming even normal business. Last month the humanitarian situation was the worst in Gaza that any one has ever known. For restaurant owner Eleina the situation is very bad. He has been forced to pay $8,000 a month for generator fuel to keep his business open. It is an achievement every month to keep his 36 staff members employed, Eleina said. “Everybody is hoping, but we have been disappointed so many times that you don’t want to let yourself have too much hope,” he said.

The USA gives the Palestinian Authority about $400 million in annual assistance — almost less than one third of what Israel gets from USA. But for now, with Hamas ceding all administrative control of Gaza, there is little danger that aid would be cut off.

Existential threat for Palestinians

Israel and USA cry loud that they face an existential threat from Hamas, claiming that this tiny population that is being attacked by Israel could wipe out both the USA and Israel. How is this even possible?

That is the Zionist strategy to show to the world that the Hamas is a serious threat to its existence. Now not even Palestinian children are impressed by that funny slogan.
When the entire Arab world could not defeat Israel, can the defenseless Hamas do anything against the powerful Zionist fascist state backed by USA and allies?

In fact, it is the Palestinians who face an existential threat from US-Israeli fascist designs and have long accused Israel of obstructing reconciliation efforts in order to weaken and divide them.

NATO and UNSC have become a theater of the absurd and instead of preserving history, they jointly distort it. In fact, NATO has even overpowered the UNSC where at least Russia and China, in order at least to protect their own interests, if not to help the world maintain peace and stability in every region, could pose some weak challenge to the US prowess.

Backed by the US veto, Israel enjoys the shield of both NATO and UNSC. Unfortunately, highly educated Americans are unable to make a distinction between an anti-Israeli bias and US prestige and that is reason why USA continues to shield the Zionist crimes as their own.

Fascist agenda of Zionism and Gaza crisis

Israel has completely squeezed the Palestinians, terrorized even children and women. Regular attacks by the Zionist military have caused severe catastrophic situation especially in Gaza Strip.

Women and children fear  the Israeli military could attack them for their blood and land.

Israel has fought three wars with Hamas; killing thousands of innocent Palestinians. Israel has interests in easing the Gaza humanitarian crisis, which it sees as a security threat.

Still, Israeli objections may cause the deal to stall before any meaningful pact can be forged. The “so-called reconciliation” between Hamas and Fatah is “a convenient cover not for Hamas’ continued existence against Israel, but also for the safety of every Palestinian. Israeli Intelligence Minister Israel Katz said Abbas’ willingness to partner with Hamas leaders was a “cause for concern” and relinquishing civilian responsibility for the Gaza Strip is a mistake.

Today, Gaza is in the midst of a worsening humanitarian crisis that has paralyzed daily life for its 2 million inhabitants. Since Hamas took control, Israel has imposed restrictive controls on trade and movement, citing security concerns. But the stranglehold worsened this summer as the Palestinian Authority asked Israel to reduce the electricity supply to Gaza, demanding Hamas pay its share of the cost and leaving Gaza inhabitants with just a few hours of power a day. It also slashed the salaries it pays to government employees. Losing support locally, Hamas has said it is ready to hand over administrative control. Meanwhile, reconciliation is now increasingly in the interest of influential regional players.

As the rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas began unity talks on October 10 in Cairo, one detail stood out as emblematic of the challenges they face: The delegation representing Hamas was led by a man who has been accused of plotting to overthrow the president of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. If that awkward hurdle can be overcome, the talks would have at least the potential to end the decade-long, sometimes bloody schism between the two groups and reshape the region’s political map. The effort is being propelled to a great extent by the increasingly desperate humanitarian situation among the two million residents of Gaza. That being said, few here think the two groups will bridge their differences.

 Significance of unity deal

As a historic event, after a decade of hostility and recrimination, the two main Palestinian factions came together in Cairo on October 12 to sign a reconciliation deal that holds out the tantalizing prospect of a united Palestinian front. Hopes for the agreement, signed under the watchful eye of Egyptian intelligence, were tempered by the knowledge that many previous Palestinian initiatives have failed. Yet there is optimism that this time may be different, partly because the stakes are so much higher.

For the two million Palestinians of Gaza, trapped in a tiny coastal strip that is frequently compared to an open-air prison, the Cairo deal offered a potential respite from their lives of dire shortages of electricity and lifesaving medicine, as well as a chance to travel to the outside world. For the Palestinian leadership, it held out the prospect of negotiating with Israel with a single voice, even as it forced the divided territory’s most radical militants to make painful concessions that acknowledged their own failure to advance their cause.

And for PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas, the 82-year-old president of the Palestinian Authority, it could amount to a legacy-saving moment in the twilight years of his rule, after years of abject failure to negotiate a peace settlement with Israel. Although he was not in Cairo, Abbas gave his blessing to the deal, which he hailed as a “final agreement.

Interestingly, the USA is also interested in Palestine unity, which it sees as a necessary step to bring about peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians. President Trump has pledged to bring the two sides together in the “ultimate deal.”

Observation: Real unity means ending divisions

At the outset the new effort for unity is a positive development in the affairs of destabilized Middle East. Many agreements have been signed in the past, but something has always caused these political parties to back away as USA and Israel somehow force them to collapse the deal and restart the fight and many analysts feel there’s still a chance for that to happen again if Fatah and Hamas are not ready to unite emotionally and with a strong purpose of full sovereignty.

Possibly, Fatah and Hamas have now realized the unless they get united it is impossible to exist on their own lands as Israel, backed by imperialist veto of USA, is now ill-focused on Palestinian children- the future of the nation.

Hamas must put an end to firing of rockets into Israel, allowing the USA to support Israeli demands to demilitarize Palestine. Time is ripe for the Hamas to change its politics that helps Israel get more sympathetic terror goods from USA. In order to be part of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the main Palestinian umbrella group Hams has to devise a wise policy to align with Abbas, as the PLO may not accept Hamas without it changing its policies, or it might lose its international recognition especially from USA and Israel.

The backer of Zionist crimes in Middle East, the USA has responded to the new unity move in Palestine as positive but very neutral. The US Middle East envoy, Jason Greenblatt, said the United States was ‘watching’ the unity developments closely, possibly with alarm, but he said that any Palestinian government must “unambiguously and explicitly commit to nonviolence, recognition of the state of Israel, acceptance of previous agreement and obligations between the parties, and peaceful negotiations.”

In effect, what the USA expects from the Palestinians is total obedience and complete surrender to Zionism. Israel and the USA want a non-military Palestine so that Palestinians could be regularly attacked by Israel with US terror goods.

Another Palestinian concern is that a unity government involving Hamas could cause the Trump government to cut funding to the Palestinian territories under congressional rules against funding terrorist organizations. American lawmakers use the aid as a bully and threaten to cut funding in reaction to a similar 2011 deal between Hamas, which the United States designates as a terrorist organization, and the Palestinian Authority. That agreement ultimately fell apart.

Egypt, which is attempting to stamp out an insurgency in its Sinai Peninsula by militants who have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, has accused Hamas of aiding the militants, allowing them to cross the border for medical treatment. Through the deal, Egypt can pressure Hamas to safeguard Egyptian security in Sinai
Cairo also has interests in drawing Hamas away from the Muslim Brotherhood, which has faced brutal crackdowns in Egypt since the ouster of Egypt’s first ever elected president and Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, in 2013.

The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are working in partnership with Egypt to squeeze the Brotherhood and curb the influence of their regional rivals Qatar and Turkey in Gaza

Meanwhile, Palestinians in the media have been increasingly calling on Abbas to travel to Gaza and lift the sanctions that he imposed in early April to pressure Hamas into relinquishing control over the territory. The visit paid by the Ramallah-based ministers of the Palestinian Authority (PA), including PM Rami Hamdallah, to Gaza on Oct. 2 gave Gaza residents hope that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would also pay Gaza a visit amid western/Israeli media reports that he would take such a step once the PA is in full control there. Abbas was last in Gaza in May 2007, shortly before Hamas seized full control of the enclave in June 2007.

Of course, neither the US nor Israel can now stop Palestine from becoming a sovereign nation that would forge strong alliances with both the Arab world and Iran and would be strongly backed by Turkey.

Time has run out for these two capitalist nations to revise their policy for the Middle East and become normal democratic states in modern times. Old tactics of fake threats won’t work in future in West Asia.

Palestinians should know that Israel and the USA could once again intervene to disrupt the unity move in Palestine and thus the factions must be watchful to sustain the unity forever.


The Middle East Pivot: Erdogan’s Turkey Seven Deadly Sins – OpEd

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Multiple wars ravage the Middle East. Turkey has inserted itself into the middle of most of these regional conflicts and ended up a loser.

Under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey has intervened and formed alliances with a rogue’s gallery of imperial warlords, terrorists-mercenaries, Zionist expansionists, feudal potentates and obscure tribal chiefs, with disastrous economic, political and military consequences for the Turkish nation.

In this paper we will discuss Turkey’s domestic and foreign policies and behavior over the past decade. We will conclude with lessons for middle range powers, which might help in future decisions

President Erdogan’s Domestic Disasters

Throughout the early decade of the 21st century, Erdoğan made a strategic alliance with an influential semi-clandestine organization led by a cult-leading cleric, Fethullah Gülen, who was conveniently self-exiled in the US and under the protection of the US intelligence apparatus. This marriage of convenience was formed in order to weaken the leftist, secular and Ataturk nationalist influenced opposition. Armed with the Gülenists’ treasure trove of forged documents, Erdoğan purged the military of its Ataturk nationalist leadership. He proceeded to marginalize the secular Republican Party and repressed leftist trade union, social movements and prominent academics, journalists, writers and student activists. With support from the Gülenists movement, ‘Hizmet’, Erdoğan celebrated his successes and won multiple election and re-election victories.

Initially, Erdoğan failed to recognize that the Gülenists/Hizmet operated as a subversive political organization, which permeated the state apparatus through a dense network of bureaucratic, military, judicial, police, and civil society organizations, with ties to the US military/CIA and friendly relations with Israeli policy makers.

By 2013, Erdoğan felt intense pressure from the Gülenists/Hizmet which sought to discredit and oust his regime by revealing multi-million dollar corrupt practices involving him and his family in a ‘Turquoise Color Revolution’ – remake of other ‘regime changes’.

Having discovered his internal vulnerability, Erdoğan moved to curtail the power and reach of the Gülenists/Hizmet controlled media. He was not yet prepared to deal with the immense scope and depth of the elite links to Gülenists/Hizmet. A Gülenists-led military coup was launched in July 2016, with the tacit support of the US military stationed in Turkey. This was foiled by a major popular mobilization with the support of the armed forces.

Erdoğan then moved to thoroughly purge the followers of Hizmet from the military, public administration, schools, business, the press and public and private institutions. He extended his purge to include secular and nationalist political leaders who had always opposed the Gülenists and their attempted coup d’état.

As a result of the coup attempt and the subsequent purge, Erdoğan weakened and fractured every aspect of the state and civil society. Erdoğan ended up securing control of a weakened state with a degraded business, educational and cultural world.

The Gülenists coup was authored and led by its supremo Fethullah Gülen, ensconced in his ‘secret’ private estate in the United States. Clearly the US was implicated in the coup and they rejected Erdoğan’s demands to extradite him.

Erdoğan’s subservience to the US/NATO leadership have undermined his attempts to strike at the roots of the coup and its internal and external power structure. The US/NATO military bases still operate in Turkey and retain influence over its military.
In the aftermath of the coup, the decline of Gülenist influence in the economy contributed to economic reversals in investments and growth. The purge of the military and civil society reduced Turkey’s military preparedness and alienated the democratic electorate. Erdoğan had already nearly lost his bid to the presidency after his earlier purges in 2014.

Erdoğan’s Foreign Policy Disasters

Perversity is when a ruler weakens its military and represses its citizens and launches a series of risky foreign adventures: This is exactly what Erdoğan has done over the past several years.

First Erdoğan backed a terrorist uprising in Syria, providing arms, recruiting overseas ‘volunteers’ and providing them with unrestricted passage across the Turkish border. Many of the terrorists proceeded to join forces with Syrian, Iraqi and Turkish Kurds in establishing military bases on Ankara’s borders.

Secondly, Erdoğan ran a scurrilous electoral campaign among the millions of ethnic Turks living in Germany – violating that powerful nation’s sovereignty. As a result, Erdoğan increased tensions and animosity with what had been its closest ally in its quest for EU membership – effectively terminating the process.

Thirdly, Erdoğan backed NATO’s invasion and bombing of Libya, killing President Gadhafi, who had been an independent voice, capable of serving as a possible ally against imperial intervention in North Africa.

Fourthly, Erdoğan backed the brief government of Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood after its electoral victory in 2012 following the ‘Arab Spring’ uprising in Egypt of 2011. He backed a formula similar to his own Turkish policy of excluding the secular, democratic opposition. This led to a bloody US-backed military coup led by General Abdel Sisi in July 2013 – a lesson not lost on Erdoğan.

Fifth, Erdoğan’s de facto friendly relations with Israel – despite verbal criticism – in the face of Tel Aviv’s assassination of nine non-violent Turkish protestors trying to break the starvation blockade of Gaza – undermined relations with the pro-Palestine Arab world and nationalists in Turkey.

Sixth, Erdoğan developed lucrative ties with Iraqi Kurd dictator-warlord, Masoud Barzani, facilitating the flow of oil to Israel. Erdoğan’s own illicit oil deals with Barzani strengthened the cause of Kurdish separatism and exposed the widespread corruption of Erdoğan’s family dealings.

Seventh, Erdoğan provoked military tensions with Russia by shooting down a warplane in Syria. This led to an economic boycott, which reduced export earnings, devastated the tourism sector and added Moscow to his list of adversaries, (Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, US, Germany, Hezbollah and Iran).

Eighth, Erdoğan backed the tiny oil-state of Qatar, sending supplies and soldiers to oppose a threat from Saudi Arabia, the other royal oil statelets and Egypt, US allies and followers.

Despite his many disastrous domestic and foreign policies, Erdoğan learned nothing and forgot nothing. When the Israelis backed the Iraqi Kurds in organizing an independence ‘referendum’ aiming to ultimately annex the rich oil fields of Northern Iraq, Erdoğan took no action despite this threat to Turkish national security. He merely made verbal threats to cut off the Kurd’s access to Ankara’s oil pipelines. He took no concrete steps. Erdoğan preferred to pocket transit taxes from the oil, antagonizing Iraq and Syria and strengthening the links between Kurdish Iraq and its secessionist counterparts in Syria and Turkey.

Because of Erdoğan failure to close down the US military base following its support of the Gülenist-led coup, the Turkish army is still heavily under US influence, opening the possibility of another uprising.

Erdoğan’s lip-service to ‘nationalism’ has served mainly as a political tool to repress domestic democratic political parties and trade unions and the Kurdish and Alevi communities.

Erdoğan’s initial support and subsequent opposition to the jihadi terrorist groups seeking to oust the secular-nationalist government in Damascus has caused ‘blowback’ – with ISIS terrorist cells bombing civilian targets Istanbul and Ankara with mass casualties.

Conclusion

Erdoğan’s unprincipled, opportunistic and pro-imperialist NATO alliance demonstrates the inability of an aspiring regional power to find a niche in the US Empire.

Erdoğan believed that being a loyal ‘ally’ of the US would protect Turkey from a coup d’état. He failed to realize that he had become a disposable pawn in US plans to instill more servile rulers (like the Gülenist) in the Middle East.

Erdoğan’s belief that Turkey’s collaboration with the US to overthrow Syria’s President Bashar Assad would lead to a successful territorial grab of Northern Syria: instead Erdoğan ended up serving the US-backed Syrian Kurds tied to the Turkish Kurds .By working to break up Syria and destroy its state and government, Erdoğan strengthened Kurdish cross border expansionism.

Erdoğan failed to recognize the most basic rule of imperial policy: There are no permanent allies there are only permanent interests. Erdoğan thought Turkey would be ‘rewarded’ by acting as a US surrogate with a share of power, wealth and territory in the Middle East. Instead, as a ‘normal’ imperial power, the US used Turkey when it was convenient and would then dispose of Erdoğan – like a used condom.

Anti-imperialism is not just an ideal and moral/ethical principle – it is a realistic approach to safeguarding sovereignty, democratic politics and meaningful alliances.

German Soccer Team Takes A Knee To Support NFL – OpEd

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While majority Europeans have no clue what the NFL is, apparently someone in Germany receives American Cable channels. Here come the players of Hertha Berlin!

Hertha Berlin wanted to attract attention to itself by kneeling down before the start of their match, nodding to social struggles in the United States.

Hertha’s starting lineup linked arms and took a knee on the pitch, while Pal Dardai’s coaching staff, general manager Michael Preetz, club officials and substitutes took a knee  before playing Schalke.

“Hertha BSC stands for tolerance and responsibility! For a tolerant Berlin and an open-minded world, now and forevermore!” the club said on Twitter. It’s all about the hashtags, besides, nobody cares what Hertha Berlin stands for, you’re a sports team!

Forward Salomon Kalou also voiced his support on the social media network.

“We wanted to make a stand against racism,” Hertha captain Per Skjelbred said after the side’s 2-0 defeat.

The action was intended to show solidarity with NFL players who have been protesting police treatment of blacks and social injustice in the U.S. by kneeling, sitting or locking arms through the anthem before games.

“We’re no longer living in the 18th century but in the 21st century. There are some people, however, who are not that far ideologically yet,” Hertha defender Sebastian Langkamp told Sky TV at halftime. “If we can give some lessons there with that, then that’s good.”

Hertha Berlin may want to turn their focus on actually winning a match. Last time we checked FC Hertha Berlin were not social workers, instead a football club.

Reducing Racial Bias In Children

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We tend to see people we’re biased against as all the same. They are “those people.” Instead of thinking of them as specific individuals, we lump them into a group. Now an international team of researchers suggests that one way to reduce racial bias in young children is by teaching them to distinguish among faces of a different race.

The study, published in the journal Child Development, is the first to show a lasting effect – and in kids young enough to not be too set in their ways.

It is co-authored by researchers from the University of California San Diego, the University of Toronto, the University of Delaware, l’Université Grenoble Alpes in France, and Hangzhou Normal University and Zhejiang Normal University in China.

Two 20-minute sessions with 4- to 6-year-old Chinese children, in which they were trained to identify black male faces as individuals, reduced implicit bias in the children for at least two months.

Key to reducing the bias? The repeat session.

“A single session had minimal immediate effects that dissipated quickly. The lesson didn’t stick. But a second session a week later seemed to act like a booster shot, producing measurable differences in implicit bias 60 days later,” said Gail Heyman, a professor of psychology in the UC San Diego Division of Social Sciences and a senior co-author on the study.

Kang Lee, of the University of Toronto and also a senior co-author, said, “We know from other research that preferences for your own race develop in early childhood. Our method has the advantage of being suitable for very young children, and it also improves children’s ability to recognize faces, which is an important social skill in and of itself.”

First author on the study is Miao K. Qian, of Hangzhou Normal University and the University of Toronto.

The researchers are careful to note that racial bias is complicated. For starters, psychologists think there may be at least two different types of bias: implicit bias, or the extent to which we have subconscious negative and positive associations with different races, and explicit bias, or preferences we’re more aware of and can (if we’re not being guarded) articulate. Implicit bias may have perceptual roots, arising from greater exposure to people of your own race, while explicit bias may be learned socially from adults and peers. Then there’s the question of behavior. How implicit or explicit bias translates into biased behavior is a subject yet to be fully explored.

“We think that reducing implicit racial bias in children could be a starting point for addressing a pernicious social problem,” Heyman said. “But it is not the complete answer to racial discrimination or to systemic, structural racism.”

The researchers worked with 95 children in an eastern city in China. All the kids were Han Chinese and, according to their guardians’ reports, none had direct interaction with any non-Asian people prior to the study. As with most longitudinal studies, there was attrition among participants for a number of reasons, with a final sample, at day 70, of 50.

To measure bias, the researchers used their own Implicit Racial Bias Test (or IRBT), which they’ve validated in a previous paper with subjects in China and Cameroon. The IRBT is a preschool-friendly adaptation of the implicit association test (or IAT). The logic of the two tests is similar: People are quicker to associate positive attributes with members of their own race than with those of another racial category. A difference in response time is taken as a measure of implicit bias. One advantage of the IRBT, the researchers say, is that it uses only pictures instead of words: simple and intuitive smiley and frowny icons that subjects are asked to pair with neutral faces of their own race or a different one.

After measuring the children’s levels of pro-Asian/anti-black bias by calculating how quick they were to pair a frowny or smiley icon with a black male vs. an Asian male face, the researchers assigned them randomly to three different training groups. One group saw black male faces, a second group saw white male faces, and a third group saw Asian male faces. These last two groups were controls to see if learning to differentiate among faces of any race, different from one’s own or the same, produced results that generalized to a third.

Individuation training consisted of learning to identify five different faces that had been numbered 1 through 5, starting with just two faces and working up to five. Training continued until the child correctly matched all five faces with their numerical “names.” This took 20 minutes on average.

There were two training sessions a week apart. A day after each training, children took the implicit racial bias test again. They were tested for bias a final time 60 days after the second training.

The results: Only the training to distinguish among black faces reduced pro-Asian/anti-black bias. Training on white faces or Asian ones didn’t make a difference. Reduction in bias was most significant after the second session and it had a longer-lasting effect than had been documented before.

The researchers are now working with a larger, more diverse group of children in Toronto over a longer term. If their intervention to reduce implicit racial bias is effective in that setting as well, they hope to develop a more consumer-friendly version of their training sessions: a fun, gamified app that could be used in schools and at home.

Wrongful Rhetoric And Trump’s Strategy On Iran – OpEd

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Mordechai Vanunu was imprisoned in Israel for eighteen years because he blew the whistle on Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. He felt he had “an obligation to tell the people of Israel what was going on behind their backs”  at a supposed nuclear research facility which was actually producing plutonium for nuclear weapons. His punishment for breaking the silence about Israel’s capacity to manufacture nuclear weapons included eleven years of solitary confinement.

Yesterday, reading about President Donald Trump’s new strategy on Iran, Vanunu’s long isolation and sacrificial commitment to truth-telling came to mind.

Donald Trump promised to “deny the Iranian regime all paths to a nuclear weapon.” But it is Israel, which possesses an estimated 80 nuclear warheads, with fissile material for up to 200, which poses the major nuclear threat in the region. And Israel is allied to the nation with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal: the United States.

Israel doesn’t acknowledge its nuclear arsenal publicly, nor does Israel allow weapons inspectors into its nuclear weapons facilities. Along with India and Pakistan, Israel refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. And it has used conventional weapons in numerous destabilizing wars which include aerial bombing of Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank.

Vanunu, designated by Daniel Ellsberg as the “the pre-eminent hero of the nuclear era,” helped many people envision nations in the region making progress toward a nuclear weapons-free Middle East.

In fact, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jawad Zarif, spoke eloquently about just that possibility, in 2015, holding that “if the Vienna deal is to mean anything, the whole of the Middle East must rid itself of weapons of mass destruction.” “Iran,” he added, “is prepared to work with the international community to achieve these goals, knowing full well that, along the way, it will probably run into many hurdles raised by the skeptics of peace and diplomacy.”

Significantly, since the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” pact with Iran was concluded in 2015, the International Atomic Energy Association has steadily verified Iran’s compliance with inspections. Iran has accepted around-the-clock supervision by IAEA officials. What’s more, “Iran has gotten rid of all of its highly enriched uranium,” according to Jessica Matthews, writing for the New York Review of Books. Matthews continues:

It has also eliminated 98 percent of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium, leaving only three hundred kilograms, less than the amount needed to fuel one weapon if taken to high enrichment. The number of centrifuges maintained for uranium enrichment is down from 19,000 to 6,000. The rest have been dismantled and put into storage under tight international monitoring. Continuing enrichment is limited to 3.67 percent, the accepted level for reactor fuel. All enrichment has been shut down at the once-secret, fortified, underground facility at Fordow, south of Tehran. Iran has disabled and poured concrete into the core of its plutonium reactor—thus shutting down the plutonium as well as the uranium route to nuclear weapons. It has provided adequate answers to the IAEA’s long-standing list of questions regarding past weapons-related activities.

What do the Iranians think of the U.S. government?  Ordinary Iranians might well think that whatever discontent they have with their own government the U.S. is their most implacable and most immediate enemy. Invective like Trump’s recent words could be a precursor of disastrous invasion.  Many Iranians remember the U.S.-backed coup that ended their democracy in 1953, and they remember the fierce U.S. support given to Saddam Hussein in the brutal eight years of the Iran-Iraq war.

Noam Chomsky rightly names the U.S. Shock and Awe attack against Iraq as the greatest destabilizing force at work in the Middle East. “Thanks to that invasion,” writes Chomsky, “hundreds of thousands were killed and millions of refugees generated, barbarous acts of torture were committed — Iraqis have compared the destruction to the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century — leaving Iraq the unhappiest country in the world according to WIN/Gallup polls. Meanwhile, sectarian conflict was ignited, tearing the region to shreds and laying the basis for the creation of the monstrosity that is ISIS. And all of that is called ‘stabilization.'”

Trump’s record of statements and of cabinet appointments suggests that regime change in Iran is a long-term goal.  Despite his close Saudi ally’s massive involvement in funding and fomenting terrorism, Trump’s evolving strategy for the Middle East strangely emphasizes Iranian impacts on the region, particularly regarding the conflict in Yemen.

Yemen is entering conflict-driven famine, with a correspondingly lethal cholera outbreak, making it the worst of the region’s “Four Famines,” now widely recognized as collectively the worst starvation crisis in the 72-year history of the United Nations. “In Yemen,” says Trump, “the IRGC, (the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp), has attempted to use the Houthis as puppets to hide Iran’s role in using sophisticated missiles and explosive boats to attack innocent civilians in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as to restrict freedom of navigation in the Red Sea.” It is Saudi Arabia and its UAE ally, with crucial U.S. backing, that have been intensely bombing Yemen since 2015 and maintaining a punishing Red Sea blockade against shipments often vital to famine relief. “The Saudi-led coalition’s ships are preventing essential supplies from entering Yemen,” according to an October 11, 2017 Reuters report. The report goes on to assess the dire consequences, for Yemen, caused by blocking and delaying ships carrying food and medicine. It documents many cases in which vessels were thoroughly searched, certified not to be carrying weapons, and still not allowed to enter Yemen.

In a time when 20 million people face starvation, it’s particularly obscene for any country to pour resources into nuclear weaponry. Mordechai Vanunu took extraordinary risks and endured incredible suffering to rescue the human species from the foolhardiness of building and maintaining nuclear arsenals. I wonder if people worldwide can rise to a level of courage and seriousness needed to simply recognize, and then, where possible, act in response to the world’s real threats. Within the U.S., can several decades of U.S. government bipartisan lying about Iran be overcome with saner, more humane narratives? Can the threat of U.S. invasion be lifted long enough to allow Iran’s people a window for once again considering democratic reforms? Silence about these issues seems ominous. But silence can be broken.

We have Vanunu’s courageous example. Let’s not waste the precious time we have in which to follow it.

Landmark EU-Cuba Deal To Take Effect November 1

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(EurActiv) — A landmark cooperation deal between the EU and Cuba will take effect on November 1, Brussels said on Thursday (12 October), a major step towards normalizing ties as tensions run high between Havana and the US.

The Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement, signed in December 2016, lays the basis for trade relations and is widely seen as a European riposte to US President Donald Trump’s hardline stance against the communist island.

The deal means Cuba joins other Latin American countries with similar agreements with the EU, whose relations with the island had previously been conducted within the so-called Common Position that linked ties to improvements in human rights.

“The agreement between the EU and Cuba will come into effect provisionally on 1 November,” a spokeswoman for the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, told AFP.

Full implementation will require ratification by all 28 of the EU’s member states, a complex process that could take years.

The two sides agreed to include a dialogue on human rights as part of the deal, which was negotiated over two years from April 2014, clearing what had been a problematic hurdle.

The rapprochement comes as relations between Cuba and Washington sour after a historic thaw under previous US President Barack Obama.

Earlier this month the US ordered the expulsion of 15 Cuban diplomats, accusing Havana of failing to protect American embassy staff from a series of attacks on their health.

The attacks, which US officials initially suggested could have been carried out with some sort of covert acoustic device, have affected at least 22 US embassy staff in Havana over the past few months.

Philippines: Elections Chief Resigns Amid Impeachment Case

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By Joe Torres

The Philippines’ Commission on Elections chairman resigned from his post on Oct. 11 hours before the country’s Lower House of Congress voted to impeach the poll official.

In a letter submitted to President Rodrigo Duterte, elections official Andres Bautista said he is tendering his resignation, which takes effect end of the year, due to “personal reasons.”

He said the ten-week period before he leaves office is meant to provide Duterte “sufficient time to choose my replacement as well as ensure a smooth and orderly transition.”

In a social media post, the official said his decision to quit was “not an easy” one.

Hours after he announced his resignation, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Bautista, making him the first official who has been impeached under the Duterte administration.

The majority of the members of the Lower House decided to reverse an earlier decision of the Committee on Justice to dismiss a petition to oust Bautista.

The head of the poll body has been accused of betrayal of public trust and culpable violations of the Constitution for allegedly not declaring his true wealth, reportedly amounting to at least a billion pesos.

Sinister motives

An opposition legislator said the Duterte administration had sinister motives for wanting to remove Bautista.

“The motivation here is to control the elections in 2019,” said Representative Antonio Tinio of the Teachers Party in Congress.

“Chairman Bautista’s impeachment is a clear attempt by President Duterte and his administration to control all vital offices, especially the supposedly independent Constitutional bodies,” he added.

The Constitutional bodies include the Supreme Court, the Office of the Ombudsman, and the Commission on Elections.

Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno and Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales are also in the process of being impeached in the House of Representatives.

Tinio said Sereno and Morales were being “targeted” by Duterte’s allies for their vocal stance against the spate of drug-related killings.

Church support

A church-backed poll watchdog lauded the decision of Bautista to resign to enable the Commission on Elections “to act as one and purposely fulfill its mandate.”

Lawyer Rene Sarmiento, a former elections commissioner who now heads the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting, said the country will be the “ultimate beneficiary” of Bautista’s resignation.

He said the poll body can now focus its attention “to pursue and design inclusively creative electoral reforms.”

The poll watchdog expressed hope that whoever replaces Bautista will be someone who is “independent, competent, and will uphold democracy.”

Upon learning of his resignation, several legislators wished Bautista well.

“I believe that his resignation is due to his love for his family. Being now removed from all the duties and responsibilities, he will now have more time to spend for his children,” said Representative Sherwin Tugna, chairman of the House Committee on Suffrage and Electoral Reforms.

Bautista’s problems started after his estranged wife publicized their marital woes and alleged that he had amassed unexplained wealth that he did not declare. He denied his wife’s allegations.

Georgia: Parliament Overrides Presidential Veto On Constitutional Amendments

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(Civil.Ge) — The Parliament of Georgia overturned on October 13 with 117 votes the presidential objections on the draft constitution and approved the initial version of the document.

Margvelashvili’s objections were presented by President’s Parliamentary Secretary Anna Dolidze, who emphasized that the proposed objections were developed in consultation with the ruling and opposition parties. “This historical moment provides a chance to turn the constitution from single-party document into the constitution of the entire political spectrum, of Georgian voters,” Dolidze noted, calling on the lawmakers to accept the presidential objections.

The ruling party MPs announced several days before the plenary sitting that they would support Giorgi Margvelashvili’s objections only if the President requested the following two changes: allowing the parties to form electoral blocs for the next parliamentary elections in 2020, and scrapping the so called bonus system, which entails the transfer of votes of the parties that fail to cross the threshold entirely to the winner.

The two points are in line with the Georgian Dream – Democratic Georgia’s commitments before the Venice Commission, undertaken later in the constitutional reform process. The ruling party was, however, unable to amend the draft constitution (content-related changes can only be introduced during the first and the second readings), and the presidential veto on them would allow GDDG to reflect additional changes in the constitution without initiating a new round of constitutional amendments.

President Margvelashvili met the ruling party request and vetoed the two points, but included three additional changes in his objections, including the transition to the fully proportional electoral system by the next parliamentary elections in 2020 instead of the ruling party-proposed 2024, as well as the proposals revising the norms related to the Constitutional Court and freedom of religion.

The President’s decision was slammed by GDDG and the party mobilized its lawmakers to override the veto at today’s plenary sitting, earning heavy criticism from the parliamentary opposition.

“It is an anti-people constitution, which promotes the establishment of authoritarian system in Georgia. It is a document, which has no supporters except one party,” United National Movement’s Roman Gotsiridze said during the plenary debates. “We will boycott the forceful adoption of the constitution and will not participate in the voting,” he added.

MP Sergo Ratiani of the European Georgia slammed the ruling party as well. According to Ratiani, GDDG deceived the voters, the political spectrum and the international community when it decided to postpone the introduction of the fully proportional electoral system. “The constitution has been tailored to the interests of only one person and it will be a crises-prone document,” he said.

Lawmakers from the European Georgian displayed a banner in the parliament chamber reading “Trampled Down Constitution.”

Speaking before the vote, Parliamentary Chairman Irakli Kobakhidze said the constitutional reform process set “an absolutely new constitutional tradition and an absolutely new constitutional culture.” “This means that the amendments were introduced not to strengthen the ruling party’s political positions, but on the contrary – with these amendments, the ruling party will worsen its positions and this is being done to strengthen democracy in Georgia.”

The Parliament of Georgia approved the draft constitution on its third and final reading at its special sitting on September 26 with 117 lawmakers voting in favor and two against it.

On October 9, President Margvelashvili vetoed the constitutional amendments and returned the draft bill to the Parliament together with his objections. Margvelashvili’s decision to veto the constitutional amendments followed his consultations with representatives of the ruling and opposition parties, as well as the release of the final opinion by the Venice Commission.

“The Embassy believes that constitutional changes create the strongest basis for lasting reform when they enjoy broad-based consensus across parties and society,” the United States Embassy in Georgia said in its brief statement on October 13.

“The Embassy places strong weight on the opinion of the Venice Commission, and supports its recommendations,” it also noted, adding that the Embassy is “disappointed” that the sides involved in the constitutional reform process could not reach consensus.


Sri Lanka’s Economy Poised To Leapfrog After Years Of Conflict, Says Finance Minister

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Sri Lanka under the unity government headed by President Maithripala Sirisena and the Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe is poised to leapfrog the economy after long years of conflict and political instability, according to the nation’s Finance Minister.

The Minister of Finance and Mass Media Mangla Samaraweera stated this when he met with the Vice President of the World Bank Ms. Annette Dixon in Washington on the sideline to the WB/IMF annual conference being held in Washington.

Ms. Annette Dixon has been in the current position since December 2014, in managing the World Bank’s engagement in South Asia to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity. She is also mandated to lead relations with eight countries including India, the institution’s biggest client. She oversees lending operations and Trust-Funded projects worth more than USD 10 billion.

Minister Samaraweera said that the Sri Lankan Unity Government has been addressing key democratization issues with such democratic institutions maintain on checks and balances which are becoming deeply rooted.

“We are celebrating 70 years of Parliamentary democracy in Sri Lanka this year and the economy will be revitalized on the strong pillars of reconciliation and democracy with far reaching reforms,” the Minister emphasized.

The Minister also briefed Ms. Dixon on Sri Lanka’s current political and economic dynamics. The Government’s policy plan for next eight years was announced recently with the title “V2025 – A Country Enriched” with an open mind. It envisages economic prosperity for all Sri Lankans, based on the principles of a social market economy. With that in mind, Minister Samaraweera said that his maiden Budget Proposals for 2018 will be presented to the Parliament on 9th November.

Sri Lanka intends to strengthen the policies suitable for a higher middle income, export-oriented economy. In order to achieve this target, the Finance Ministry has been convening high-level meetings with the public and private sector stakeholders while gathering innovative ideas from diverse partners in order to broaden the scope.

Are Returning Jihadists A Major Threat? – Analysis

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By Thomas R. McCabe*

The Islamic State (ISIS) caliphate is on the path to losing control of the core territory it dominates in both Iraq and Syria. What will then become of the thousands of foreign jihadists who joined ISIS, especially from Western countries? A major concern is that these fighters, or at least many of them, will return to their countries of origin where they will pose a major threat, especially in Europe.[1]

There is also the risk that ISIS fighters, especially from other Middle Eastern or former Soviet states, will try to make their way to Europe as “refugees” rather than return to the police states from whence they originated. Reportedly only a small portion of ISIS fighters have become disillusioned with its ideology, and about half remain committed to it, rendering them impervious to counter-messaging and rehabilitation efforts.[2]

Syrian government soldiers captured by the Islamic State. The battles in Iraq and Syria are wars of annihilation where quarter is rarely given and where most prisoners of war are eventually killed. ISIS has also been vocal about genocidal intentions toward Shiite Muslims and Alawites.
Syrian government soldiers captured by the Islamic State. The battles in Iraq and Syria are wars of annihilation where quarter is rarely given and where most prisoners of war are eventually killed. ISIS has also been vocal about genocidal intentions toward Shiite Muslims and Alawites.

While this may finally be changing,[3] Europe as a whole has had trouble with information-sharing on foreign fighters, and individual countries are unable to properly identify and track returning jihadists.[4]

At first glance then, the situation looks dire. A closer look, however, indicates a more positive picture. The threat these foreign fighters pose may turn out to be smaller than widely expected, perhaps significantly less.

Understanding the reasons for this may help the authorities, especially in the West, plan properly to thwart those jihadists who do make their way back from the battlefields of the caliphate.

The Nature of the War

The battles in Iraq and Syria are wars of annihilation where quarter is rarely given and where, especially in Syria, most prisoners are eventually killed. ISIS has been particularly vocal about its genocidal intentions toward Shiite Muslims and Alawites, proudly advertising its war crimes, including the systematic slaughter of “sectarian” prisoners.[5] For their part, the Iraqi security forces (composed largely of Shiite troops) and the largely Alawite Syrian army, not to mention the Shiite militias operating in both countries (notably Hezbollah) have committed their share of atrocities.[6] Functionally speaking, these militias are often as enthusiastically murderous as ISIS members and have evidently also made it their practice not to take prisoners.[7]

Moreover, the various government and government-aligned forces fighting ISIS are not the only enemies the organization has. Syria in particular is a multifaceted civil war with ISIS fighting numerous other anti-Assad factions, including nationalists and other jihadists. Since ISIS has brutally imposed its system on those conquered, there will be little love lost between the group and other factions, if and when it has to retreat. Popular and factional resentment of ISIS’s vicious rule is thus likely to lead to revenge killings of its fighters once the opportunity presents itself. In particular, ISIS and al-Qaeda factions in Syria (notably Hay’at Tahrir ash-Sham) have spent extensive time and effort killing each other, and al-Qaeda is likely to view ISIS remnants—especially those who defected to it from al-Qaeda—as traitors who betrayed their oath of unconditional allegiance to al-Qaeda and its leadership.[8]

For these reasons, it is reasonable to assume that large numbers of ISIS foreign fighters have already been killed.[9] While figures vary widely, the loss rate of foreign fighters in Syria in particular has been appalling. For example, in September 2016, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that at least 52,000 of the more than 430,000 killed in the Syrian civil war were, by that point, foreign Sunni jihadists.[10] Presumably, many of these were fighting for ISIS, which is one of the largest rebel factions. Certainly, more ISIS foreign fighters have been killed in Iraq. By all accounts, the present ground fighting, both in Mosul and in northern Syria, is intense, which means that ISIS is taking heavy casualties, which are likely to grow as the battle for Raqqa intensifies.

Furthermore, the Assad regime has a long history of treating any prisoners it takes with extreme brutality.[11] Its opponents, including ISIS, may choose to go down fighting rather than be taken captive and endure such treatment. In addition, anybody who can be identified as a foreign fighter may be viewed by the Assad regime as “terrorists” who caused the war and may be meted even harsher treatment than other prisoners.[12]

The Nature of ISIS

For ISIS fighters, dying while fighting is expected. So far, there have been few ISIS surrenders in the battle for Mosul where the organization has routinely used massed suicide bombers; and while it appears to prefer that its “martyrs” be volunteers, ISIS combatants can be ordered to undertake “martyrdom” operations.[13] This means that such operations are accepted as a routine tactic and part of the self-identity of ISIS fighters; the group’s recruiting campaign has made it clear that recruits should come prepared to die. Some ISIS jihadists have been executed for not fighting to the death while some have been executed for refusing orders to become suicide bombers.[14] Even if some ISIS fighters are prepared to surrender, others are clearly not.[15] Such diehards will fake surrenders and then try to kill their would-be captors. How many false surrenders will it take to convince any of those willing to take prisoners to shoot first and ask questions later?[16]

ISIS has also announced its intention to execute anyone caught trying to desert; in Raqqa alone during some months in 2015, it executed 120 deserters.[17] What this means is that ISIS has made it difficult for anyone to walk away from the fight.

ISIS also presents bureaucratic obstacles to those who may wish to flee the fight. It may well have confiscated foreign fighters’ passports on arrival, or the fighter may have destroyed his passport to demonstrate he did not intend to return to his country of origin. If ISIS has someone’s passport, the group is unlikely to return it. Further, in the confusion of a war, ISIS may inadvertently lose the passports. [18]

Foreign Fighter Recruits

While there are a variety of reasons that foreign fighters join ISIS, recruits are frequently drawn from what might be called the “murderously devout.” These are a subset of the supporters of jihadism who believe that the ISIS interpretation of Islam provides the proper way to run a society.[19] Often, Western recruits seeking a more authentic Muslim identity belong to this category and have joined the organization because they wanted to live in an imagined utopian Islamic society.[20] They often believe they are engaged in a cosmic war of good against evil; some even believe they are fighting in the End of Times presaged in the Qur’an—”the Hour.”[21] People who have invested their identity in ISIS in this fashion are not likely to readily abandon the organization even when it is sustaining heavy losses.

SIS recruits are frequently drawn from what might be called the "murderously devout." They may regard dying in battle as its own reward. As a result, a high attrition rate can be expected of foreign jihadists.
SIS recruits are frequently drawn from what might be called the “murderously devout.” They may regard dying in battle as its own reward. As a result, a high attrition rate can be expected of foreign jihadists.

More importantly, having accepted the ISIS ideology and psychology, they may regard dying in battle as its own reward. An enemy who looks down the barrel of a rifle and sees paradise is not likely to surrender. Therefore, a high attrition rate can be expected of foreign jihadists. Additionally, the limited fighting experience of most Western foreign fighters is likely to encourage ISIS commanders to view them ultimately as expendable. In the first place, most Western jihadists have not had prior military training or experience. ISIS has tended to use them in support roles, including its extensive media operations.[22] However, as the ISIS territory further contracts, this “B” list is likely to be pressed into the front line. While the organization provides several weeks’ training for new recruits, this is unlikely to give them more than very basic combat skills. This means they are likely to take heavy losses once in combat. Additionally, inexperience may lead them to overrate their capabilities, leading them to take risks that better-trained or more experienced troops would not.

Moreover, Western foreign fighters are often not trusted—they are reportedly closely watched. Many are said to be in jail because they wanted to desert.[23] Even if ISIS does not execute them on such suspicions, the group may opt to deal with potentially unreliable jihadists as the Soviets used their “punishment battalions” in World War II: Push them into combat, preferably in the first wave, to clear land mines and barbed wire, so to speak, with reliable troops coming up behind who will either shoot them if they try to surrender or retreat, or take advantage of their deaths to clear the way. In either case, such fighters are likely to incur heavy losses.

Concern over an influx of returning foreign jihadists may also be mitigated to some degree by a reduced flow of foreign fighters to the region. This has occurred for at least two reasons:

  • In the past, a significant portion of recruits was drawn to the image of ISIS as a victorious, all-conquering army sweeping its enemies before it. Those days are long over and ISIS is now fighting and losing a defensive war.
  • Because of improved border control by surrounding states, especially Turkey, ISIS has largely lost physical access to the outside world and its potential pool of foreign jihadists. While in the past, Ankara was a comparatively open environment for ISIS, this has changed as the terror group has increasingly targeted Turkey.[24] Further, most of the Syrian side of the Turkish-Syrian border is now controlled by the Kurds, who number some of ISIS’s most determined opponents.

Augmenting the West’s Defenses

EUROPOL researchers claimed in mid-2016 to have information on more than four thousand Europeans who had traveled to join ISIS and its associates.
EUROPOL researchers claimed in mid-2016 to have information on more than four thousand Europeans who had traveled to join ISIS and its associates.

Not only is the size of the potential pool of returning jihadists likely smaller than feared, but there are other steps that can reduce the danger they pose. For a start, depending on where they come from, foreign jihadists may be very reluctant to return to their countries of origin even if they can do so. This is likely to be the case if they come from states with governments that take a very hard line against would-be jihadists, such as Russia and the United States. Imprisoning them for having been foreign fighters helps deter them from returning.

A systematic effort to keep Western jihadists from coming back must consist of at least two parts:

First, it involves a comprehensive attempt to identify foreign fighters. Unfortunately, such efforts did not start until recently; until at least mid-2015, international undertakings to identify Westerners going to join ISIS in the Middle East were very fragmented.[25] Now, however, there are a variety of efforts underway to identify such Western jihadists. These include those of EUROPOL, which in mid-2016, claimed to have information on more than four thousand Europeans who had traveled to join ISIS and its associates. INTERPOL as well as the Counterterrorism Group of the Club de Berne are also working to identify Western jihadists, and the Schengen Information System, a large-scale data system that supports external border control and law enforcement cooperation in EU states, had data on eight thousand terror suspects by early 2017.[26] In addition, there are private efforts such as those of the London-based International Centre for Study of Radicalization and Political Violence or the database of Samia Maktouf on Francophone jihadists.[27]

Furthermore, much information on foreign jihadists has been recovered from the Middle East itself, including up to 3,800 profiles provided by a defector, along with a large collection of apparently credible information acquired in Turkey, and extensive information gathered after the capture of the town of Manbij in Syria.[28] For their part, Western security and law enforcement agencies are finally making efforts to consolidate and expand this data, pooling the results in order to identify comprehensively those who have gone abroad and their current status.[29] These databases should be kept as minimally classified as possible to enable maximum sharing with allies, including those in the Middle East, as Washington has apparently been doing with Operation Gallant Phoenix in Jordan.[30]

Second, affected states need to start a systematic effort to apprehend and prosecute foreign jihadists. This consists of several components:

  • Mounting a vigorous effort to apprehend foreign jihadists before they return: British and other European intelligence services are apparently cooperating with rebel groups to find, capture, and return imprisoned ISIS supporters.[31]
  • Turning ISIS’s confiscation of foreign fighters’ passports to an advantage: Anyone who shows up at an embassy in a surrounding country and reports his or her passport lost or stolen should face very close scrutiny.
  • Reversing current Western counterterrorism efforts: Rather than prevent people from going to the Middle East to join ISIS or other terrorist groups (where the attrition rate is much higher), keep them from returning. A better policy would be to let them go and concentrate efforts on keeping out those who attempt to return from the battlefield. To accomplish this, all Western governments should suspend, and preferably revoke, the passport of anyone who is confirmed as having gone to join ISIS or any other terrorist organization. The intention is to block their return and disrupt their ability to travel to other places.
ISIS terrorist Khaled Sharrouf became the first Australian to be stripped of citizenship under anti- terrorism laws. These provide legal procedures for revoking the citizenship of any dual or naturalized citizens documented as having gone abroad to fight for terror organizations.
ISIS terrorist Khaled Sharrouf became the first Australian to be stripped of citizenship under anti- terrorism laws. These provide legal procedures for revoking the citizenship of any dual or naturalized citizens documented as having gone abroad to fight for terror organizations.

The Western nations would do well to follow Australia’s precedent and develop legal procedures for revoking the citizenship of any dual or naturalized citizens documented as having gone abroad to fight for terror organizations. Any jihadists wishing to return home will need to earn the right to do so. They should be allowed to come back only if, functionally speaking, they defect, i.e., they agree to unconditional cooperation with security authorities.[32] If they refuse, they should be prosecuted not just for providing material support to terrorism, but for treason, by committing the equivalent of joining a hostile military in wartime. According to U.S. law, an American convicted of treason or who joins the military of a hostile state loses his or her U.S. citizenship.[33] Washington has begun proceedings to do so in at least one case, that of Iyman Faris.[34]

Western authorities should also be highly skeptical of claims of success in efforts to rehabilitate jihadists. As with gang members, such programs may work on some of those on the fringe of these organizations, but for the hard core whose identity is rooted in jihadism—and this should be the default assumption for anyone willing to travel to the Middle East to join the jihadists—these programs are probably a waste of time and money.[35] ISIS recruits willingly joined an openly murderous organization, and they joined it because they agreed with it. The group has never hidden what it was doing or why it was doing it, so recruits cannot claim they joined out of ignorance or did so in spite of what ISIS is. Washington should view these people in the same light as those who might join the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, or, even more appropriately, people who might have moved to Nazi Germany to join the SS. In addition, hard-core returnees may refuse to even participate in such programs.[36]

Implications

The above discussion does not mean that there will be no threat. ISIS is working diligently to establish a network for continuing terrorist operations in the West,[37] and it is not the only group that foreign jihadists have joined—al-Qaeda in particular remains active. Further, returning fighters are not the only potential source of recruits for terrorist operations. Radicalized migrants and refugees, radicalized native-born Muslims, alienated non-Muslims drawn to jihadist ideology, and the criminal underclass all pose real danger.[38] Hence, while the danger to the West from returning ISIS jihadists may be less than widely expected, the threats from these returnees and other sources remain real.

About the author:
*Thomas R. McCab
e is a retired Defense Department analyst and a retired U.S. Air Force reserve lieutenant colonel who worked ten years as a Middle East military analyst and two years as a counterterrorism analyst. This article represents his work and should not be considered the opinion of any agency of the U.S. government.

Source:
This article was published in the Middle East Quarterly’s Fall Edition 2017.

Notes:
[1] An estimated 271 jihadists had returned to France by August 2017. Newsweek, Aug. 6, 2017. See also: Deutsche Welle (Bonn), July 26, 2016; The New York Times, Sept. 17, 2016; The Washington Post, Oct. 24, 2016.

[2] The Washington Post, Nov. 29, 2016.

[3] The Guardian (London), May 13, 2017.

[4] Newsweek, Dec. 22, 2016.

[5] “The Rafidah: From Ibn Saba to the Dajjal,Dabiq, al-Hayat Media Center, Jan. 2016, p. 45.

[6] The Washington Post, Nov. 20, 2016; Jack Watling, “The Shia Militias of Iraq,The Atlantic, Dec. 22, 2016.

[7] The Guardian, Aug. 24, 2014; Aki Peritz, “Self-Defeating Brutality: Why a war without mercy against ISIS is destined to fail,Slate (New York and Washington, D.C.), May 4, 2015.

[8] Charles Lister, “Al-Qa’ida Plays a Long Game in Syria,” Combating Terrorism Center, West Point, Sept. 11, 2015;Charles R. Lister, The Syrian Jihad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 104.

[9] The Hill (Washington, D.C.), Dec. 17, 2016.

[10] “About 430 thousands were killed since the beginning of the Syrian revolution,” Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Coventry, U.K., Sept. 13, 2016.

[11] “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Deaths in Detention in the Syrian Arab Republic,” United Nations Human Rights Council, (A/HRC/31/CRP.1), Feb. 3, 2016; see, also, Ben Taub, “The Assad Files: Capturing the top-secret documents that tie the Syrian regime to mass torture and killings,” The New Yorker, Apr. 18, 2016; Adam Ciralsky, “Special Report: Documenting Evil: Inside Assad’s Hospitals of Horror,Vanity Fair, June 11, 2015.

[12] Lister, The Syrian Jihad, chap. 4.

[13] Mark Perry, “How Iraq’s Army Could Defeat ISIS in Mosul—But Lose Control of the Country,Politico (Arlington, Va.), Dec. 15, 2016; Long War Journal (Washington, D.C.), Dec. 6, 2016; Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, May 21, 2014; Defense One (Washington, D.C.), Sept. 12, 2014.

[14] Fox News, Jan. 12, 2016; Peter Van Buren, “Islamic State’s rules of attraction, and why U.S. countermoves are doomed,” Reuters, Oct. 21, 2014; “ISIS ‘Biter’ Squad Vanishes When Called for Suicide Bomb Duty,” Clarion Project, Washington, D.C., Nov. 15, 2016.

[15] Reuters, Nov. 29, 2016.

[16] Daily Beast (New York), Nov. 14, 2016.

[17] Newsweek, Oct. 15, 2016; Sami Moubayed, Under the Black Flag (New York and London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), p. 135.

[18] “The Isis papers: a masterplan for consolidating power,The Guardian, Dec. 7, 2015.

[19] Sunday Express (London), Oct. 19, 2014; NBC News, Sept. 3, 2014; The New York Times, Mar. 21, 2015; Benedetta Argentieri, “‘Lady Jihad’ Lured Her Family into Terror; Fatima Az Zahra convinced her parents and sister to move to Syria… it didn’t go well,War Is Boring, July 9, 2015.

[20] “By the numbers: ISIS Cases in the United States,” Center on National Security at Fordham Law, New York, Mar. 1, 2014-June 22, 2015; Cori E. Dauber, “ISIS and the Family Man,Small Wars Journal, July 1, 2015; Sydney [Aus.] Morning Herald, July 9, 2015.

[21] Rick Noack, “The ISIS apocalypse has been postponed but the militants might still believe in it,The Washington Post, Oct. 17, 2016.

[22] Moubayed, Under the Black Flag, p. 156.

[23] Mike Giglio and Munzer al-Awad, “How to Lose Your Mind to ISIS and Then Fight to Get It Back,Buzzfeed, Apr. 13, 2016.

[24] Aaron Stein, “The Islamic State in Turkey: A Deep Dive into a Dark Place,War on the Rocks, Apr. 6, 2016; Meira Svirsky, “Secrets and Lies: Turkey’s Covert Relationship with ISIS,” The Clarion Project, Washington, D.C., Mar. 29, 2016; Uzay Bulut, “Turkey Releases ISIS Suspects,” The Clarion Project, Apr. 3, 2016.

[25] “Combating Terrorist and Foreign Fighter Travel,” U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee Task Force, Washington, D.C., Sept. 2015, pp. 28-30.

[26] BBC News, Aug. 2, 2015; Daily Mail (London), May 28, 2016; Reuters, Aug. 8, 2016; The Guardian, May 13, 2017.

[27] Mary Anne Weaver, “Her Majesty’s Jihadists,The New York Times, Apr. 14, 2015; Mitch Prothero, “Why Europe Can’t Find the Jihadis in Its Midst,Buzzfeed News, Aug. 21, 2016.

[28] Der Spiegel Online (Hamburg), July 18, 2016; Reuters, July 27, 2016; Defense One, Oct. 6, 2016.

[29] The Times of Israel (Jerusalem), June 22, 2017.

[30] The New York Times, July 27, 2016.

[31] BBC News, Oct. 12, 2016.

[32] Aki Peritz, “A Jihadi Bride Has Second Thoughts. Should Britain Let Her Return?Overt Action (Chicago), Aug. 20, 2015; The New York Times, Aug. 29, 2016.

[33] “U.S. Code, Title 8, Chapter 12, Subchapter III, Part III, § 1481,” Cornell University Law School Legal Information Institute, Ithaca, N.Y.

[34] Fox News, Feb. 11, 2017; Kavitha Surana, “Justice Department Moves to Revoke U.S. Citizenship from Man Convicted in 2003 Terror Plot,Foreign Policy, Mar. 21, 2017.

[35] Leslie Shaw, “French Deradicalization Plan: So Far, Not Working,” The Clarion Project, Washington, D.C., Sept. 18, 2016.

[36] Clarion News, The Clarion Project, Washington, D.C., Nov. 3, 2016.

[37] Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Nathaniel Barr, “[Hot Issue] Recent Attacks Illuminate the Islamic State’s Europe Attack Network,” Jamestown Foundation Hot Issue, Apr. 27, 2016.

[38] On the criminal underclass, see, for example, The Daily Beast, Feb. 10, 2017.

The Afghan People: Observing Nearly 40 Years Of Violent Conflict – Analysis

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By Richard Ghiasy*

On Friday 29 September, an Islamic State suicide bomber disguised as a shepherd attacked a Shiite mosque in Kabul as worshippers were leaving. They killed five people and wounded at least 20 others. It was one of numerous attacks in Afghanistan this year.

Over 70 per cent of the Afghan population has been born amidst violent conflict. Afghanistan is home to Asia’s youngest population: the median age is just 18.6 years. For many of the Afghan people, conflict and insecurity taint daily life. This has been the case since late 1979–nearly 40 years by now.

In the 1980s, during the Soviet war, rural Afghanistan suffered the most. In the first half of the 1990s it was urban Afghanistan’s turn, particularly Kabul, as different factions battled for power during the country’s three-year civil war. Kabul was shelled fiercely and indiscriminately.

Relative order, albeit through draconian measures, returned during the Taliban’s reign in the second half of the 1990s. Yet, financial, socio-ethnic and physical insecurity prevailed–more so among the country’s multitude of ethnic minorities. The most secure and hopeful period, arguably, were the 3–4 years that followed the toppling of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda cells by the US-led intervention in late 2001. But hope slowly faded and physical insecurity rose again.

Since around 2005 the frequency of terrorist attacks, most notably by the Taliban, the Haqqani network and Islamic State (known as Islamic State Khorasan in the region) have grown structurally. Kabul, a city built for some 700,000 inhabitants and now home to about one-sixth of the country’s estimated 34 million population, has become a preferred target. Attacks have become much more frequent, bold and creative–as the shepherd’s attack last week shows.

The fighting season–typically running from early spring to late fall due to rather harsh winter conditions in most of Afghanistan and the closure of mountain passes between the country and Pakistan–has become year-round. Even festive days are targeted now. The fighting season is characterized by suicide bombings, assassinations, attacks on security forces, and clashes between these forces and the insurgency. Sometimes, even entire cities are overrun, as was the case in Kunduz in 2016, the country’s fifth largest city.

No individual is spared: not the ‘whitebeard’–as Afghan seniors are colloquially referred to–nor the juvenile. No location is spared: hospitals, cemeteries, supermarkets and mosques–such as in Herat in August this year–have all been attacked. And no event is spared, including peaceful demonstrations, and funerals.

These terrorist attacks intend to inflict as much damage and suffering as they can, and consequently attract much national and international media coverage. In the age of social media, it amplifies people’s fear. How does it make an Afghan feel to know that an estimated 11.000 terrorists entered their country in 2015-16? Or that 3,498 civilians died and 7,920 civilians got injured as a result of conflict in 2016 alone? Or that 26 per cent of these fatalities were children? Every new year sets new records.

Irrefutably, Afghanistan was an economically impoverished state before conflict commenced; insecurity over finance, food and health was common. Yet, physical insecurity was a marginal concern.

Typically, Afghan daily life is therefore conducted behind walls. Indeed, this has been the case in the country’s rural areas for a long while–particularly for women–but many urban dwellers are increasingly forced to act likewise due to protracted insecurity. Kabul, for instance, is a city–or rather a cluster of fortresses–where concrete walls, blast barriers, barbwire, gated communities and military are ever-present.

People are constantly on edge as common activities such as meeting up in a restaurant or commuting have turned into risky undertakings. Mothers and fathers off to earn a living or to buy a loaf of bread for the family, have no guarantee that they will make it back home.

Take the massive sewage truck suicide bombing in central Kabul during morning rush hour on 31 May this year. It left 150 dead, and more than 460 people injured. In fact, it was so powerful that blast barriers–structures of metal and concrete specifically built to protect against such attacks–crumbled down. Some described it as an earthquake.

Sadly, such atrocities on Afghan civilians will continue. It is highly likely that the Afghan people will observe 40 years of violent conflict and insecurity in late 2019. The battle between the Afghan security forces and the insurgency is in a deadlock: neither side has a feasible chance of overthrowing the other. A self-perpetuating combination of weak institutions of governance, a dismal economy, political bickering, foreign intervention, and geopolitical scheming helps sustain conflict.

Therefore, calls for a political settlement with the Taliban, among Afghans, as well as among a number of international stakeholders, including the US and China, are growing stronger. Yet, this process is going to be cumbersome and slow–and may not result in an actual settlement. As the Taliban once stated: ‘you have the watches, but we have the time‘.

About the author:
*Richard Ghiasy
is a Researcher in the SIPRI China and Global Security Programme.

Source:
This article was published by SIPRI.

Dilemmas And Experiences Of International Support For Inclusive Peacebuilding – Analysis

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By Clare Castillejo*

Introduction

In recent years growing evidence has emerged that inclusion – i.e. that all groups should participate in and have their interests addressed through political decision-making processes – is a critical factor for a successful transition out of conflict. For example, World Bank research (World Bank, 2011) analysed all post-cold war cases of civil war and found that (with one exception) those countries that avoided relapse had adopted an inclusive political settlement. Likewise, a recent study of 40 peace and constitution-making processes by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies found that if societal actors were meaningfully included, agreements were more likely to be reached and sustained (Paffenholz, 2015b). Indeed, it is now widely recognised that post-conflict peacebuilding offers an opportunity to address patterns of political, economic or social exclusion that can drive fragility. As Kaplan (2015) argues,

precisely because they lack social cohesion and robust institutions, fragile states are organized around exclusion and inequality …. Inclusiveness is the most important priority for transitions because, however difficult in practice, it is the only realistic way for fragile states to break the dysfunctional societal and institutional patterns that hold back change.

Together with this knowledge, a policy context has emerged that gives unprecedented emphasis to promoting inclusion in international support for peacebuilding. For example, the 2011 New Deal stipulates that assistance in fragile and conflict-affected states (FCAS) should be structured around five peacebuilding and statebuilding goals (PSGs), the first of which is “Legitimate politics: foster inclusive political settlements and conflict resolution”. The New Deal represented a major advance in committing international actors to work more politically to promote inclusion in FCAS. However, recent reviews of its implementation suggest that, despite these commitments, in practice “the New Deal’s implementation has been dominated by technical responses. Normative commitments to inclusivity are proving difficult to translate into practice” (Hearn, 2016: 12). So, while the New Deal has positioned the politics of inclusion centrally within policy frameworks, it has not yet significantly enhanced the way international actors work on this issue.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were agreed in 2015, put issues of peace, inclusion and governance at the heart of global development commitments. SDG 16 to “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels” explicitly recognises the importance of inclusion to sustainable peace and development. SDG 16 is a major advance in this area, not only because it provides high-level policy commitment to inclusion, but because it creates accountability for national and international actors to deliver on this commitment and ensures that progress on this issue will be monitored and measured, while providing a powerful framework for citizens to make claims for inclusion.

Both the adoption of the SDGs and the lessons now emerging from the implementation of the New Deal have generated frank debate among international actors working in FCAS about what is required to effectively promote inclusion and why they have so frequently failed to do so. This has included analysis of how international engagement in FCAS must change in order to meet the international community’s ambitious new goals on inclusion and peace.

What needs to change

Working politically on inclusion

One of the clearest messages to emerge from such analysis is that international actors need to become better at understanding and working with the power dynamics and politics of FCAS. In particular, they need to improve their ability to situate their support for inclusion within an understanding of how patterns of exclusion and struggles over inclusion (e.g. demands for participation or for a greater share of resources) relate to the broader policy economy of peacebuilding and contestations over the post-conflict political settlement.

While many international actors recognise the importance of such a politically informed approach, in practice they frequently offer technically focused, standardised political reform packages that are based on Western models of the state and focus on formal procedures rather than the  practices of power. Such approaches often assume that exclusionary practices can be addressed by capacity development, rather than being a problem of lack of political will.

Overcoming these weaknesses requires far better political analysis. While many international actors conduct political or conflict analysis, this is often partial in focus, undertaken only at the beginning of an intervention, conducted by individuals with limited knowledge of the context, and not used to meaningfully inform interventions. A review of the implementation of PSG1 found that “the toolkit for political analysis tends to be unfit for its purpose, due to its superficiality, static and state centred nature” and that

internal operational constraints such as high staff turnover, risk aversion, poor local language skills, short-termism, inter-donor incoherence, a lack of focus on learning and institutional incentives sharply reduce donor ability to understand and act upon the complexity of the inclusiveness and legitimacy of domestic politics in fragile societies (Van Veen & Dudouet, 2017: iii).

This suggests that international actors must find ways to improve their understanding of context, for example through long-term relationships with local research institutes, dialogue with a broader range of actors and engagement beyond the capital. They must also build their own analytical capacity and dedicate more resources to undertaking analysis and to using the findings to develop contextually relevant interventions.

However, it is not only a political understanding that is lacking, but also the ability to operate politically to promote inclusion. The review of PSG1 implementation found that while international agency staff are often aware that FCAS are characterised by hybrid political orders, low levels of institutionality and high levels of informality, nonetheless their support programmes focus heavily on the procedural, technical and formal aspects of politics, which are the areas they are most familiar with (Van Veen & Dudouet, 2017).

New approaches to working politically have emerged in recent years from the development field, which could be particularly useful for international actors seeking to foster inclusion in FCAS. These approaches are based on an understanding that change in complex and deeply embedded power structures, such as those that perpetuate exclusion, will be incremental, non-linear and require long-term engagement. They move away from rigid pre-planned activities and a focus on inputs (e.g. the number of “excluded” people trained/participating) to working more flexibly with local reform agents to identify local problems and seek locally owned solutions. This “requires continually tracking shifts in the influence, alliances, motivations, ideas, and interests of key players and change agents and using that information to adjust … strategies” (Ladner, 2016). Such politically smart approaches could help international actors to move away from pre-set assumptions about how to foster inclusion and to more effectively negotiate the complexity, unpredictability and resistance that such a move involves.

Balancing the inclusion of elites and the broader population

Another challenge for international actors is that of balancing support for the “horizontal inclusion” of elite groups and their interests with support for the “vertical inclusion” of the broader population in peacebuilding. In contexts where international actors have significant strategic or security interests, such as Afghanistan or Somalia, the focus has largely been on the inclusion of elites with the potential to undermine stability. Where international actors have fewer such interests, such as in Sierra Leone or Nepal, more attention has been given to the participation of broader sections of the population. The importance given to horizontal or vertical inclusion in peacebuilding has important practical implications for priorities and sequencing, e.g. regarding whether, when and how an initial bargain between elites should be expanded to include the broader population.

Researchers disagree over the importance and feasibility of including groups other than elites in negotiations over the post-conflict political settlement. However, international actors generally take the approach that the short-to-medium-term priority should be a bargain that includes major elite groups to establish a peaceful political order, while in the longer term more open and inclusive institutions are required to build stability and resilience. Given this approach, Rocha Menocal (2015: 25) suggests the key question for international actors is how the

boundaries of a political settlement that may have a narrower focus on elite inclusion, at least in the short term, can be expanded to address wider state/society relations and create a more broadly inclusive political order – in terms of both process and outcomes.

Answering this question requires international actors to have a strong understanding of elite-constituency relationships in the contexts in which they operate, including how changes in intra-elite and elite-constituency relations shape each other, and the implications of this for the political settlement. For example, the post-independence settlement in South Sudan included the main elites, but its failure to include the broader population made it more brittle and vulnerable to a return to violence when the elite pact broke down. Likewise, in Nigeria, the political settlement is horizontally inclusive of all major elites, but growing conflict and extremism suggest a breakdown in vertical relations between elites and lower levels of society.

International actors should support the development of context-specific processes to strengthen, sequence, and connect both horizontal and vertical inclusion, with the long-term goal of moving from elite bargains to inclusive politics and institutions. This must involve seeking ways to enhance elite-constituency relations and incentives for elites to represent constituency interests, as well as facilitating the direct inclusion of wider constituencies in peacebuilding. It requires working with political parties, customary governance institutions, religious or customary leaders, landowners, and other such institutions through which elites and constituents relate.

Developing an inclusive process

In seeking to promote inclusive post-conflict states, international actors focus heavily on promoting inclusion within formal peace and reform processes (albeit mostly with a limited understanding of inclusion as representation). They can do this through mediation, funding, technical advice, and diplomatic pressure, particularly in their engagement with power holders and potential spoilers. This focus on inclusive processes is due to growing re­cognition of their value, as well as because such processes are areas where international actors frequently have leverage. According to Paffenholz (2015b), inclusive processes can send a strong normative signal, enrich and broaden the negotiation agenda, foster legitimacy and public buy-in, bring wider expertise to the process, and generate pressure on the main parties.

Choosing the most appropriate modalities for inclusion in each context is critical. The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies study (Paffenholz, 2015b) found that successful processes always involve a mix of modalities, and identified a variety of options that can be combined and sequenced in different ways. These range from direct inclusion in negotiations to observer status, consultative forums, civil-society initiatives, public decision-making through referendums and various other modalities. International actors can help identify the most appropriate inclusion modalities, drawing on experiences from other contexts. Once modalities of inclusion have been agreed on, international actors can help build the capacity of groups to participate effectively and ensure that mechanisms are in place to transfer messages from wider participation modalities to the negotiating table. Rausch and Luu (2017) stress that such transfer mechanisms are critical because peacebuilding takes place at many levels and greater emphasis is required on ensuring that messages from local communities are heard at the national level.

Promoting inclusive processes inevitably involves risks and trade-offs. A common trade-off is between the inclusion of multiple voices and the stability of the process, especially where there is a high level of resistance by the main parties. When demands for inclusion threaten to destabilise the process, international actors frequently back off rather than making an effective case for inclusion or seeking alternative modalities for excluded groups’ voices to be fed into negotiations. The Graduate Institute study found that elites tend to accept the inclusion of broader constituencies primarily for strategic rather than normative reasons (Paffenholz, 2015b). Therefore, in responding to elite resistance, international actors can suggest strategic motivations – e.g. related to increasing public buy-in or bringing in potential spoilers – rather than simply make normative arguments. The study also noted that although the inclusion of women was most strongly correlated with successful outcomes, it was the hardest to achieve (Paffenholz, 2015b). This highlights the importance of developing both strategically compelling arguments and practical incentives to promote women’s inclusion.

Even where there is agreement about including wider groups, there are difficult choices about which groups to include, and risks that those chosen will be the most acceptable to the conflict parties, most vocal, or most accessible to international actors. Moreover, once wider groups have become part of the negotiation process, there are risks that the powerful parties will try to manipulate or silence them. International actors need to be aware of these risks, and should consult widely on which groups should be included and maintain close communication with them to prevent coercion.

Converting process into influence and outcomes

While international actors focus strongly on inclusive formal processes, they pay less attention to the decisions and policies that emerge from such processes, or the outcomes these produce for populations. Instead, they often assume that the inclusion of marginalised actors in formal processes will automatically result in inclusive outcomes. As the review of PSG1 found, “quantitative increases in process inclusivity, such as representation quota, consultation/meeting frequency, or participation rates, are assumed to improve input and output legitimacy” (Van Veen & Dudouet 2017: 10).

However, evidence suggests that this assumption is not well founded. For example, a recent multi-country study (Dudouet & Lindström, 2016) found that higher political and societal representativeness within the state apparatus does not necessarily translate into more inclusive policies and service delivery, or material benefits for the population. The limitations of this assumption can be seen in contexts such as Guatemala, where strong international support for inclusive peace processes did not result in significantly more inclusive political or socio-economic outcomes. Conversely, in countries such as Rwanda there have been significant inclusive socio-economic outcomes without inclusive processes.

It seems there is a need to better understand the relationship between inclusion in peace or reform processes, the inclusive content of agreements that result from these processes, and inclusive political and distributional outcomes that follow, and to ask how one leads to another and how international actors can support all three. Inevitably, a variety of factors shape whether and how inclusive processes result in inclusive outcomes.

Firstly, there is the relationship between the formal and informal spheres and the question of where power really resides. In many FCAS, informal power relations, institutions and networks are far more powerful than formal ones. Hence, inclusive formal processes, and even the inclusive formal institutions and rules that may emerge from them, are unlikely to result in inclusive outcomes if informal power relations do not change. It is therefore important to understand how formal and informal rules relate to each other, and identify incentives that can promote a shift in informal rules.

There is also the question of who is chosen to represent the interests of a given group in peace and reform processes. For example, there is evidence that women selected to participate in such processes tend to be close allies of political leaders, socially conservative and unlikely to challenge elite male interests. Similarly, international actors in FCAS usually engage with a limited set of English-speaking, capital-based civil society organisations and hence tend to promote the participation of the elite leaders of these organisations. It is critical that international actors supporting peacebuilding reach out to and include a much broader range of actors, including those who may not share the same peace or reform agenda, but nonetheless are representative of societal groups, such as traditional leaders or social contestation movements. This can of course involve dilemmas around including those such as religious/traditional actors who can play an important role in building peace, but may themselves perpetuate patterns of exclusion.

Another barrier to achieving inclusive outcomes is the inability of groups participating in a peace or reform process to exercise meaningful influence. There can be a variety of reasons for this. The mechanisms through which participation happens can have various forms: for example, whether representatives of excluded groups are embedded within a broader delegation or whether they form an autonomous collective voice. For example, in Nepal, indigenous members of the Constitutional Assembly were chosen by mainstream political parties, which constrained their ability to advocate for their interests, as compared with representatives of some ethnic groups that had their own parties.

Lack of capacity is another major challenge in converting presence into influence. Indeed, Dudouet and Lundström (2016: 30) argue that “participation only translates into influence on decision-making if accompanied by effective empowerment mechanisms”. While international actors frequently support the capacity of marginalised actors to participate, this often involves training focused on building individual capacities. However, it is the collective capacity of groups to mobilise across different levels, overcome divisions, develop a common agenda, and challenge power structures that is most critical and should be the focus of capacity-building. For example, in Yemen’s national dialogue women formed a 30% quota, but failed to have much impact because they did not act as a unified group. Effective influence is also hindered by discriminatory norms and attitudes, e.g. towards women or minorities.

Finally, a major challenge is that, even where a process and its resulting agreement have been inclusive, there can be a lack of capacity or political will to implement the agreement. As Paffenholz (2015b: 3) argues, “most attention of the international community goes into the negotiation phase. However, many processes fail or substantial gains of inclusive negotiations get lost during implementation”. This is deeply problematic, because ultimately it is not the deal that is agreed, but its outcomes that shape vulnerability to return to conflict. It is therefore essential that international actors remain engaged throughout the implementation of a peace agreement. Such engagement can include building the capacity of government to implement the agreement and of civil society and opposition forces to monitor implementation, as well as education and media work to develop a conducive environment for implementation. It is also important that international actors support the establishment of appropriate post-agreement monitoring mechanisms that have inclusion in their mandate. For example, civil society groups in Kenya played a critical role in monitoring the implementation of the 2008 peace deal.

Inclusive peacebuilding at the country level

Afghanistan

In Afghanistan, the international community has provided vast resources for peacebuilding and governance reform for over a decade. However, rather than building a stable and inclusive state, this assistance has largely entrenched power distortions, inequalities and poor governance. The weaknesses of international engagement in Afghanistan highlight some of the challenges and trade-offs for international actors seeking to promote inclusive peacebuilding.

At the formal political level, horizontal inclusion has been established in Afghanistan, with elites from all major groups represented in the government of national unity, although the exclusion of the Taliban from peacebuilding initiatives over the years has created a permanent group of spoilers. However, there has been little move towards vertical inclusion that would give the wider population a meaningful voice in, and benefits from, Afghanistan’s peacebuilding process. Indeed, marginalised groups such as women and young people remain largely excluded from current peace initiatives and institutions at the national and local levels.

This situation has been created by an excessive focus on the procedural aspects of democracy – particularly elections – with international actors assuming that this would create a more legitimate and inclusive state. However, because of existing power imbalances, these formal democratic processes did not facilitate genuine political competition or result in more inclusive and representative governance, but instead allowed powerful actors to secure their interests via elections. The emphasis on formal democratic process also did little in terms of inclusiveness. Although there have been improved outcomes in specific areas – such as education – Afghanistan’s governments have done little to improve services, economic prospects or security for the wider population, while donors have been distracted from these issues by their focus on democratic processes. Critically, in dealing with the Afghan government, donors have frequently acted as though its weaknesses – including its exclusionary, unaccountable and corrupt nature – were problems of capacity (to be remedied through technical support and training) rather than lack of political will.

There has been significant focus on New Deal implementation in Afghanistan. However, according to Van Veen (2016), PSG1 has been implemented in a very limited way, with no emphasis on the meaningful inclusion of non-elite groups. This is in large part because Afghanistan’s

donors generally have a modest and one-sided understanding of the nature and dynamics of Afghan domestic politics … a narrow outlook on what type of activities constitute support for the promotion of more legitimate and inclusive politics, and a limited suite of instruments for doing this (Van Veen, 2016: 2).

Another weakness in the international response has been its heavy focus on the central state and formal institutions, and its failure to take account of local voices and needs, or to engage sufficiently with informal institutions or local power holders. This is partly because security concerns mean that international agencies interact with a very limited range of Kabul-based officials and civil society elites. This approach has exacerbated the gap between Kabul and the wider population, and the exclusion of this population in terms of both voice and outcomes. Oxfam (2017) argues that international actors should increase their

focus on local peacebuilding processes, for example, by providing financial support to grassroots civil society organizations in rural areas … [because] most conflict takes place at the local level and revolves around disputes inter alia related to land or water allocation, legal affairs, poverty, unemployment, religious affairs or the rights and obligations of customs .

Finally, Afghanistan illustrates how international actors negotiate trade-offs between short-term stability and longer-term governance and societal goals. Van Veen (2016) describes how prioritising the fight against terrorism came at the price of stimulating corruption and warlordism, enabling elite capture of international funds, and reducing the legitimacy and inclusiveness of governance. Ultimately, this approach has produced poor outcomes for the population.

Somalia

Somalia was one of the first countries to pilot the New Deal and provides an interesting study of the extent to which New Deal commitments on inclusion translate into the effective international promotion of inclusive peacebuilding in a context of weak government and significant international security interests. While Somalia is unusual in having a dedicated PSG1 working group, this group apparently focuses on a limited governance agenda related to elections and institutions rather than broader efforts to promote inclusion.

International support for peacebuilding in Somalia has generally been supply driven and based on technical blueprints, with little focus on Somali priorities. The New Deal was intended to increase national ownership. However, while it has provided more space to include a Somali vision, this has been the vision of a small group of government and civil society elites, while other voices have remained excluded. The failure to develop a more inclusive and representative New Deal country compact was in large part due to externally imposed time limits on the process, a failure to consult with regional elites and civil society, the exclusion of potential spoilers such as Islamic political actors, and the failure to address important issues such as the distribution of economic power. The result has been excluded groups resisting the New Deal agenda.

Somalia suffers from a significant gap between national-level peacebuilding agendas and local voices and priorities, and as a result local-level actors see internationally supported peace initiatives as a top-down imposition in the interests of a small elite. Gruener and Hald (2015) argue that lack of capacity at the local level exacerbates this exclusion, because only large, national-level NGOs have the capacity to handle internationally supported initiatives, while community-level capacities involving traditional conflict resolution mechanisms are typically overlooked.

International actors’ security interests and anti-terror agenda overshadow all their engagement in Somalia, and – as in Afghanistan – this has not proved conducive to building inclusive and legitimate governance. Extremely tight security restrictions also severely restrict international actors’ abilities to engage beyond the capital or to understand the local political context and perspective and the interests of the wider population.

The locally owned and relatively successful peace process in the breakaway republic of Somaliland provides an interesting contrast with the various failed internationally driven peacebuilding processes in Somalia. Following its secession in 1991, Somaliland’s leaders negotiated a peace that has continued to hold. It appears that critical to this success was the fact that Somaliland did not receive international assistance, and hence its leaders were able to set their own agenda and timeframe for building peace. As Phillips (2013: 3) argues,

Somalilanders were not pressured to accept “template” political institutions from outside and could negotiate their own locally devised, and locally legitimate, institutional arrangements. There was sufficient time and political space for solutions to evolve, rather than an attempt to impose pre-determined institutional end points.

Moreover, incentives for elites to cooperate were local and tangible rather than shaped by ever-shifting external assistance.

What has emerged is a horizontal elite pact that includes all major groups and that maintains a balance of power between clans and sub-clans. This settlement is undoubtedly flawed in many ways: it is not in line with international norms of best-practice peacebuilding, is not inclusive of grassroots communities and voices, and is based on collusion between political and economic elites and an exclusionary distribution of economic opportunities and outcomes. However, it has brought relative peace and served better than the many peace attempts in Somalia.

Analysis of Somalia and Somaliland provides lessons about the importance of locally led processes and the dangers of externally imposed peacebuilding agendas and timeframes. As Phillips (2013: 7) comments, “Foreign development assistance should be about more than fixing institutional gaps using the technical lens of imported and transferable best practice. The case of Somaliland underlines that legitimate institutions are those born through local political and social processes.” This example underlines the need to support locally legitimate processes and actors – even when these do not fit international frameworks and are uncomfortable for international actors – while still maintaining momentum towards greater inclusion. For example, this can be done by supporting those whose voices are usually marginalised in such local processes to successfully mobilise, engage with and influence these processes, as well as encouraging and incentivising the local elites leading these processes to open them up to include broader sets of actors and interests. It also raises questions about how a home-grown and relatively stable elite pact, such as in Somaliland, can be broadened to include the wider population. Also, it emphasises that New Deal implementation, even in a highly challenging context such as Somalia, must move beyond engagement with a small group of elite interlocutors and a focus on formal processes to build a locally owned and more holistic inclusion agenda.

Nepal

Nepal provides an example of a context where there has been a strong emphasis on inclusive processes and political space for previously excluded groups and where international actors have promoted an inclusion agenda, but where this has largely not resulted in inclusive outcomes.

Nepal’s conflict was driven by grievances related to exclusion, and a core demand of the Maoist rebels was for a more inclusive state. The 2006 peace process placed inclusion issues at the centre of mainstream political debate, with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) including a commitment that “the state shall be restructured in an inclusive, democratic and forward looking manner” (CPA, 2006). This was followed by a lengthy constitutional reform process that was highly inclusive in terms of representation and participation, with quotas for women, indigenous groups, ethnic groups and Dalits in the Constitutional Assembly. While this new political space enabled excluded groups to mobilise in unprecedented ways, they were ultimately unable to significantly influence decision-making, which continued to be dominated by traditional political elites. The constitution that was finally pushed through by the leaders of the main political parties, while containing some progressive elements, ultimately reflects elite interests, fails to provide the inclusive restructuring of the state that the CPA promised and has been widely rejected by marginalised groups.

International actors in Nepal have focused heavily on promoting inclusive peacebuilding. This is because they recognised that exclusion was a major driver of conflict, because the emphasis on inclusion in the CPA gave them a mandate to work on this issue, and because their own lack of immediate strategic interests in Nepal gave them space to do so. In the first years following the conflict, international actors actively championed inclusion and identity issues, frequently integrating these into political dialogue with leaders and support to peacebuilding and reform processes. They built the capacity of excluded groups to mobilise and participate in peacebuilding, and strengthened such groups’ access to state institutions and services.

This international emphasis on exclusion prompted a backlash from Nepal’s elite, and since 2012 Nepal’s governments and bureaucracy have used arguments about international interference and the imposition of Western values to push back against donor engagement on identity and exclusion issues. This is part of a broader trend in which the Nepali establishment has resisted international pressure on a range of normative issues, such as transparency and accountability, and human rights. As a result, in recent years donors have had less space to engage on exclusion or to support excluded communities. As Neelakantan et al. (2016: 10) argue,

from 2006 to 2012, international donor partners referred heavily to the language of social inclusion and targeted programming for historically marginalised communities and regions … [but] some donor projects aimed at inclusion and federalism came to be heavily criticised by parts of Nepal’s traditional establishment for having stoked ethnic sentiment or promoted ethnic federalism, and donors subsequently backed away from the inclusion agenda.

In the face of this resistance, Nepal’s donors have been largely reluctant to continue championing inclusion issues, and have prioritised improving relations with the government. Partly for this reason, international actors were initially supportive of the new constitution, despite its failure to live up to inclusion commitments. As protests grew, international actors increasingly raised concerns, although the International Crisis Group reports that this was done in a way that was overly cautious and poorly coordinated (ICG, 2016).

There is no doubt that international actors in Nepal showed significant commitment to promoting inclusion, particularly in the early years of peacebuilding, and that their support was critical to empowering excluded groups and deepening the debate on inclusion. However, they did not develop effective strategies to deal with elite resistance, nor did they always recognise the way in which inclusion issues were embedded in broader contestations over the political settlement. For example, women’s demands for citizenship rights were rejected because of elite desire to push back against a specific ethnic group and promote an exclusive definition of Nepali identity. Critically, international actors frequently failed to effectively link the support they gave to marginalised groups to their broader peacebuilding and statebuilding programmes, resulting in inclusion issues becoming somewhat “siloed”. These actors also focused strongly on inclusion in formal processes and did not sufficiently take account of either informal power dynamics or discriminatory norms as factors preventing marginalised groups from translating participation into influence.

Conclusion

Many of the ingredients required to improve international support for inclusive peacebuilding appear to be in place. There is unprecedented high-level policy commitment on the issue, along with new monitoring frameworks that are being developed for SDG implementation. There is also appetite among international actors working on peace and development to prioritise this agenda, as well as an honest recognition of where previous initiatives have gone wrong. Moreover, new evidence is emerging, including lessons from New Deal implementation, that provides valuable insights on what has and has not worked in various contexts.

As the three cases above illustrate, the way in which international actors approach the issue of inclusion, the priority they give it, how they define it, and how they seek to foster it varies widely among contexts and depends on a range of internal and external factors. However, there does seem to be growing agreement that effective support for inclusive peacebuilding – no matter the context – requires a few core elements. These include a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how patterns of exclusion and demands for inclusion relate to the political economy of peacebuilding, and, flowing from this, a politically informed and contextually relevant approach to working on these issues. It also includes a broadening of focus to look beyond inclusion in formal, national-level processes and institutions, and also address informal and local processes, institutions and power dynamics, and to prioritise inclusive outcomes. To do this, international actors will need to engage with a much broader range of actors and more widely outside the capital, as well as stay involved to support implementation over the longer term.

Ultimately, to be able to deliver on their commitments on inclusion, international actors will need to invest in their internal capacity to understand and work effectively on the politics of inclusion in FCAS, and incentivise their staff to prioritise this. They will also need to be willing to take risks to promote inclusion, recognising that the long-term benefits of genuine inclusion can outweigh short-term gains, whether in terms of security and elections in Afghanistan, speedy aid processes in Somalia, or relationships with elites in Nepal.

About the author:
*Clare Castillejo
is a research associate at the Overseas Development Institute. She specialises in governance and rights in fragile states, with a particular interest in inclusive peacebuilding and statebuilding, and has worked with donors, UN agencies, think tanks, and NGOs on a range of conflict- and peacebuilding-related issues. Her main areas of expertise are South Asia, West Africa, and the Middle East and North Africa. She has an MA in the anthropology of development from the University of London.

Source:
This article was published by NOREF.

Footnotes:

  • 1 – An agreement among fragile states, donors, and international civil society to improve international policy and practice in fragile and conflict-affected contexts.
  • 2 – See, for example, reviews of the New Deal by Van Veen and Dudouet (2017) and Hearn (2016).
  • 3 – These approaches, which have emerged from various research groups, include thinking and working politically, problem-driven iterative adaptation, politically smart and locally led development, and implementing development differently.
  • 4 – For differing positions on this issue, see, for example, Barnes (2009) or Parks and Cole (2010).
  • 5 – Members of the lowest caste in the country’s traditional caste system.

References:
Barnes, C. 2009. Renegotiating the Political Settlement in War-to-peace Transitions. London: Conciliation Resources.

CPA (Comprehensive Peace Agreement). 2006. Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the Government of Nepal and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist).

Dudouet, V. & S. Lundström. 2016. Post-war Political Settlements: From Participatory Transition Processes to Inclusive State-building and Governance. Berghof Research Report. Berlin: Berghof Foundation.

Gruener, S. & M. Hald. 2015. “Local perspectives on inclusive peacebuilding: a four-country study.” Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation Development Dialogue Paper no. 13. Uppsala: Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation.

Hearn, S. 2016. “Independent review of the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States for the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding.” New York: Center on International Cooperation, New York University.

ICG (International Crisis Group). 2016. Nepal’s Divisive New Constitution: An Existential Crisis. Asia Report no. 276. Brussels: ICG.

Kaplan, S. 2015. “Developmental leadership: putting inclusiveness first.” Developmental Leadership Programme blog. Birmingham: DLP. http://www.dlprog.org/opinions/developmental-leadership-putting-inclusiveness-first.php

Ladner, D. 2016. “Thinking and working politically: a way forward on SDG 16.” Asia Foundation. http://asiafoundation.org/2016/02/17/thinking-and-working-politically-a-way-forward-on-sdg-16/

Neelakantan, A. et al. 2016. Peace, Power and Inclusive Change in Nepal: Political Settlements in Practice. London: Conciliation Resources.

Oxfam. 2017. “Written input of Oxfam for the new EU Strategy in Afghanistan.” https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/initiatives/ares-2017-2169565/feedback/F1763_lv

Paffenholz, T. 2015a. “Inclusive politics: lessons from and for the New Deal.” Journal of Development and Peacebuilding, 10: 84-89.

Paffenholz, T. 2015b. Can Inclusive Peace Processes Work? New Evidence from a Multi-year Research Project. Inclusive Peace and Transition Project Policy Brief. Geneva: Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.

Parks, T. & W. Cole. 2010. “Political settlements: implications for international development policy and practice.” Asia Foundation Occasional Paper no. 2. San Francisco: Asia Foundation.

Phillips, S. 2013. “Political settlements and state formation: the case of Somaliland.” Developmental Leadership Programme Research Paper no. 23. University of Sydney. December. http://publications.dlprog.org/Political%20Settlements%20and%20State%20Formation%20-%20the%20Case%20of%20Somaliland.pdf

Rausch, C. & T. Luu. 2017. “Inclusive peace processes are key to ending violent conflict.” Peacebrief. Washington, DC: USIP.

Rocha Menocal, A. 2015. Inclusive Political Settlements: Evidence, Gaps, and Challenges of Institutional Transformation. Developmental Leadership Programme. Birmingham: University of Birmingham.

Van Veen, E. 2016. Mistakes, Means and Opportunities: How Donors Understand and Influence Legitimate and Inclusive Politics in Afghanistan. The Hague: Netherlands Institute of International Relations “Clingendael”.

Van Veen, E. & V. Dudouet, with J. Hemmer & S. Lundström. 2017. Hitting the Target but Missing the Point? Assessing Donor Support for Inclusive and Legitimate Politics in Fragile Societies. Paris: OECD. https://www.clingendael.nl/sites/default/files/Hitting_the_target.pdf

World Bank. 2011. World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security and Development. Washington, DC: World Bank.

The Kyrgyz Presidential Elections: Peaceful Transfer With 5 Caveats – Analysis

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Voters in Kyrgyzstan select a new president – the first peaceful transfer of power for Central Asia since 1991.

By Michał Romanowski*

With the presidential elections slated for October 15, Kyrgyzstan is on the eve of a political reshuffle. Incumbent President Almazbek Atambayev, appointed in 2011, is constitutionally barred from running for a second term. He is about to leave the scene and do something no leader in Central Asia has done in modern history – peacefully transfer the power and retire.

Yet, this is not a story about democracy on the rise.

Kyrgyzstan, once dubbed a beacon of democracy in the region, has slumped towards an autocratic regime, where the government increasingly controls social and political life. Similarly to its local neighbors, power is concentrated in the hands of a narrow circle of people; corruption is pervasive, and media are increasingly oppressed.

Having experienced two political coups in little more than a decade, Kyrgyzstan has not been treated gently by history. Those with the decision-making authority in the country, including President Atambayev, often abuse their positions, and it seems their major objective is to monopolize the power and not delegate it for the common good.

The two frontrunners in the presidential race – former Prime Minister Sooronbai Jeenbekov and multimillionaire and leader of the opposition coalition Omurbek Babanov – appeal to different portions of the electorate. Jeenbekov, a protégé of Atambayev, has not been shy about promoting the candidacy. Babanov is doing what he can to mobilize young citizens, positioning himself as Kyrgyzstan’s best chance at reform.

Here are five key point to keep in mind as the Kyrgyz head to the polls:

1. Kyrgyzstan as special case: The vote is set to be the first since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 in which a president in Central Asia will freely hand over his office. Standard regional practice has previously been either to secure subsequent terms with dubious 90-percent electoral support as in the case of Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. Or, let go of power only as a result of a heart attack as in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

Kyrgyzstan, with about 6 million people, has long been regarded as a black sheep in the Central Asian fellowship.  Twice during the past 12 years the Kyrgyz people have demonstrated their determination to go against the political current and directly influence politics in their country. In 2005 and 2010, two autocratic leaders were ousted from power by national revolutions. However, this created only limited impact on other Central Asia regimes where politicians had seemed to be glued to their offices and societies were too passive to bring about any change.

For elections in Kyrgyzstan, one must expect the unexpected. Citizens have proved to those in power that in the end they call the shots and authorities will be held accountable for their actions. The attitude promotes political pluralism and a substitute for real electoral competition.

2. Russia as key: For more than two decades, Central Asian elites have looked to Moscow for patronage and most importantly for financial support. Over time, the Russian money tap directed at the region has significantly dried, but still the Kremlin exerts influence over the Central Asian ruling castes. Utilizing high level meetings and state media propaganda popular across the region, Moscow has sufficient leverage to tip the balance in favor of a preferred candidate.

When meeting with his Kyrgyz counterpart on September 29th, Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev expressed hope for continuity in relations between the countries. Russia has so far shown no strong preference on candidates for this election, but whoever wins must reckon with the former big brother. In addition to close trade links, Moscow owns the gas infrastructure in Kyrgyzstan and maintains a strong presence on the ground through the Kant military base, located 20 kilometers from the capital.

3. Opposition not welcome:  Repression against regime critics has been on the rise since 2015. Coupled with the lack of an independent judiciary system, this is eroding both domestic politics and the country’s media landscape.

Today, politically charged trials are bread and butter in the Kyrgyz arbitrary structure. Two opposition figures, including Omurbek Tekebayev, the leader of the Fatherland party in the parliament, have been sentenced to lengthy prison sentences on corruption charges. Tekebayev, who intended to run in the presidential elections, was thus smoothly cut from the competition.

Further, access to free media is becoming increasingly limited as online outlets, and independent television broadcasters like Sentyabr, or September, a private channel are shut down by the state on extremism charges. In recent years journalists, from the news website Zanoza.kg for example, have also been fined with absurdly high judgments obliging them to pay thousands of dollars in damages to Atambayev for criticizing him.

4. State assistance: As campaigning picks up pace in Kyrgyzstan, both state and private financial resources are allocated to promote presidential candidates. “In-kind” support, however, is more precious than gold.

Jeenbekov, the pro-government contender, has received full administrative assistance on his way to claim the office. There are reports of state employees being pressured to vote for candidates from the ruling party. After a deputy prime minister openly agitated for Jeenbekov, the Central Election Committee issued a mild verbal reprimand. He also received public support from the country’s former chief mufti, leader of all Muslims in Kyrgyzstan, even though the electoral code clearly forbids religious clerics from advocating for political figures.

5. International arena:  Given Kyrgyzstan’s political gravity and the dependence of its economy on gold exports, remittances from labor migrants in Russia and foreign aid, sovereign foreign policy is not easily pursued from Bishkek. The same could be said about other Central Asian countries, however Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are rich in mineral deposits, providing them with some upper hand in the international markets.

For more than a decade Kyrgyzstan has balanced itself delicately between Moscow and Beijing. China has grown to be the biggest investor and creditor in the country, advocating for a rejuvenation of the Silk Road between Europe and Asia. Russia for its part strives to tie Kyrgyzstan more firmly to itself through the Eurasian Economic Union, security cooperation and management of Bishkek’s foreign debt.

These powerful partners will stay no matter who wins the elections. And the multi-vector foreign policy of Kyrgyzstan, taking into account the country’s geographical position and its anemic economy, is likely to be continued.

*Michał Romanowski is an expert in Eurasian affairs at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. 

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